Addressing the Nursing Shortage
February 7, 2008
Governor Martin O'Malley
I want to thank you all for being here. And, Mr. Colmers -- thank you, John, for the kind introduction and inviting us here. Thank you also, Ms. Jamieson, for telling us about St. Joseph's Launch Program.
There are so many good institutions, hospitals, colleges, universities, throughout our State who understand something that our government is only now catching up to. And that is that we have a tremendous need in our State for people who want to become nurses. It is one of those programs that virtually every college throughout our State and every university where we have a lot more people applying than we can accept, because of certain challenges when it comes to recruiting and retaining qualified nurse instructors.
But it's a darn shame, because then you come to places like St. Joseph's and Johns Hopkins, where they could expand programs, they could grow our health sector if only they could get more nurses into the profession and into the hospitals.
Well, when we -- over the course of these next several days we're talking a lot about workforce and the need that we have to address the workforce needs that we have as a State. And in so doing we can make our State a much better place, we can not only improve, in this instance, health care, but we can also grow our economy, because the health care sector is a big, big part of why Maryland is going to come through this national downturn more quickly than other States in the nation.
I want to thank Secretary Colmers, our head of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, for his strong leadership. And also our Secretary of Higher Education, Secretary Lyons, who is working -- they're working collaboratively together to address what we anticipate will be a shortage of about 17,000 in the short term of the years ahead. The need for 17,000 nurses.
It is great to have people like Dr. Janet Allan, the Dean of the University of Maryland School of Nursing, here leading this top-notch institution and helping us find solutions to this nursing shortage.
During the last few months, we were able to restore fiscal responsibility to our State. Part of that involved the creation for the first time of a dedicated stream of funding for higher education. And part of that stream is committed to meeting the most chronic and immediate workforce shortages that we have as a State and one of those things is nursing.
We have a number of different initiatives and collaboratives that are under way and this year we have dedicated $3.4 million in the 2009 fiscal year budget, that higher education investment fund, to redesign nursing curriculums, to increase recruitment of financial aide, to increase enrollment, and renovation and upgrade of nursing education facilities. All contributing to workforce creation and research in economic competitiveness.
And this all dovetails nicely with another topic that we've -- also about workforce, which is restoring and bolstering, in some cases, career technical training courses in all our high schools in our State. We walked through a great program at Bladensburg High School, that's a pipeline for nursing.
All these various pipelines combined will allow us to meet the shortage in the years ahead. And it's something that is critically important for us to engage in as a State, because the most recent budget that the President submitted to Congress, it would actually propose a 30 percent cut to these very programs that the Federal Government had been involved in in the past that would have helped us meet this shortage.
So we're going to continue to do all that we can and John Colmers is here and also Secretary Lyons is here as well, they're going to be talking a little more. But it's only from partnerships like the interagency collaboration and workforce development programs that our State is in a unique position to bring together -- and with great partners like St. Joseph's in the private sector with their innovation of the launch program. We will continue to build these partnerships because without these partnerships, we're not going to be able to meet these critical shortages that we have in nursing.
To all of you who are here who have chosen to go into nursing, I thank you for doing that. You are a very, very important people to our State. You're very, very important to our quality of life. And I have -- as Chief Executive in the City and then as Governor, have had many occasions to go visit people in hospitals. And I can tell you that I have never had an experience where the nursing staff did not act with total professionalism and compassion in all of the many visits. So I'm kind of a frequent flyer to hospitals.
I really do appreciate how hard your job is, how hard you work at it, and I know you wouldn't be in it if you didn't carry something very special in your hearts in your service to all of us.
So, we're going to make your Government work, we're going to get you some more colleagues and meet the needs that we have in the years ahead.
Thank you. (Applause.)
