Foundations Join Forces to Address Workforce Issues
By Christina Orlovsky, senior staff writer
It’s been said that two heads are better than one when embarking on a successful endeavor. A new program takes this idea of teamwork tenfold in its efforts to address the nursing shortage in communities nationwide. Partners in Nursing’s Future is a nine-state, 10-foundation collaborative aimed at exploring solutions to the nursing industry’s most pressing issues.
Led by the Northwest Health Foundation, based in Portland, Oregon, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, New Jersey, the new five-year, $10 million project sought proposals from local foundations interested in addressing distinct nursing workforce issues. The project awarded its first group of recipients in Sept. 2006 and has since begun receiving proposals for the second group.
Judith Woodruff, J.D., director of strategic initiatives for Northwest Health Foundation and program director for Partners Investing in Nursing’s Future, explained that the project is a necessary step to involve local foundations of all kinds in improving the state of the nursing workforce on both a local and national level.
“Our thought was to create a network of foundations doing work in their own communities to address the shortage so that as a whole it doesn’t rely on a national funder,” Woodruff said. “We have realized that every area has its own distinct needs and issues regarding the nursing shortage, which is something that a national funder has a great deal of difficulty getting its arms around. By engaging the foundations at the beginning, they get very involved and remain engaged at the end of the two-year grant.”
Woodruff added that the creation of Partners Investing in Nursing’s Future also opened the floor for discussion between groups that had never met before on the issue of the nursing workforce.
“A lot of the feedback from groups that didn’t receive funding was that even though they didn’t get funding, they will keep meeting on this issue,” she said. “That is very gratifying and the spillover we were hoping to see.”
The project sought proposals for innovative programs to address the shortage, but was careful to realize that what might not be considered innovative for some was highly innovative for others.
“For some local foundations that had never addressed nursing issues before, just bringing them together was innovative,” Woodruff asserted. “Others who are beyond that came in with different types of projects, and we wanted to be respectful of all of their focus areas. We noticed that while a lot of the shortage issues are the same, the response isn’t always the same, and we wanted to honor the foundations’ commitment, whether they are baby steps or giant leaps.”
Among the first batch of grantees moving forward on their projects are Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation, whose Nursing for Life: RN Career Transition Program aims to extend the careers of experienced nurses in Michigan by developing transition programs into non acute care settings; Hawaii Medical Service Association Foundation, which addresses recruitment and retention issues in long-term care and aims to attract new nurses to the geriatric specialty; the Rasmuson Foundation in Alaska, which will increase the number of native Alaskans trained in nursing and the St. James Healthcare Foundation in Montana, which will provide nursing students a career success skills program designed to retain them in Montana’s nursing workforce. According to Woodruff, Montana is the state that receives the least amount of funding for nursing in the country.
“We decided it was very important to fund that region,” she said.
In the second call for proposals, the Partners Investing in Nursing’s Future project solicited briefs that addressed areas that were lacking in the initial group, including public health and long-term care. The group received such proposals, as well as a bulk of proposals related to nursing education.
“This isn’t surprising because the education community has identified the specific problem and they know what they need to address it, so they’re better equipped to approach foundations,” Woodruff stated. “We saw a lot of faculty development projects, which is a very hot topic, along with projects developing the clinical education component.”
Addressing all of these key issues on the local and regional level, she concluded, as well as reaching out to foundations that typically have not been approached with regard to nursing, are the only ways to achieve long-term improvements in the nursing workforce.
“This problem is a long haul and we’re only barely into addressing it. In order to do that, you can’t just give one grant. What we’re trying to do is establish within these foundations the belief and the hope that they will invest in the long run in their community so they’re not looking at this first project but how it is going to lay the foundation for continued work in this area,” she said.
“There are tremendous resources in local foundations that have not been tapped in regard to the nursing workforce. We need to reach out and identify how this relates to their particular interest. A foundation that is focused on aging, for example, needs to understand that long-term care and nursing will be beneficial to them; one that addresses economic issues needs to realize that nursing is a viable career for the economy,” she added. “The theory is to reach out not to the typical funding group, but to really get to the foundations that you wouldn’t on the surface associate with nursing. We have to get out of preaching to the converted and reach out to those who have, up to now, been unaware or uninvolved.”
For more information, visit the Partners Investing in Nursing's Future Web site.
© 2007. AMN Healthcare, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
