Nurse training partnership to help with instructor shortages

Shenandoah University, Valley Health and the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association have teamed up to tackle the Shenandoah Valley region’s nursing shortage by creating a program that can be replicated statewide.

Called NextGen Nurses, the program will use semi-retired and retiring nurses as preceptors — experienced licensed clinicians who serve as teachers and coaches — to supervise SU’s Eleanor Wade Custer School of Nursing students during their clinical rotations.

“There is an extreme nursing shortage in the Shenandoah Valley and across the country, and all schools of nursing are affected by their inability to achieve the required clinical hours due to the shortage of preceptors,” says Lisa Levinson, the school’s acting dean.

About 100,000 registered nurses left the nationwide workforce over the past two years due to stress, burnout and retirements, according to a National Council of State Boards of Nursing study. Nonprofit health system Valley Health needs 100 to 150 nurses annually to fill vacancies at its hospitals, practices and urgent care systems in the northern Shenandoah Valley and parts of West Virginia, says the health system’s chief nursing executive, Theresa Trivette.

“What we heard from our frontline teams is, ‘We want more nurses, but we’re really struggling with the time commitment it takes to train them,’” Trivette says, so she and Levinson sought a solution. They discovered that semi-retired and retiring nurses are used as preceptors in several states. So, with VHHA’s help, they received a matching $496,000 grant to create NextGen Nurses from the state’s GO Virginia economic development initiative.

SU also collaborated with Valley Health to develop free online training modules for nurses who want to become preceptors. It also added equipment to its simulation lab, where students can complete a quarter of their 500 required clinical hours. This helps reduce the need for preceptors and clinical training sites.

Valley Health’s goal is to hire 35 nurses who’ve completed the modules as part-time preceptors at $40 an hour. It’s already hired two. Each preceptor will support two students at a time but will work with multiple two-student groups throughout the year.

“We assign them students that they are then married to, if you will, for the entirety of their clinical rotation with us,” Trivette says, “so they get the value of their experience as well as the mentorship of the same person and not whoever might be working that day.”