Many of Wisconsin's nursing students are hired months before they graduate as desperate need continues
Madeline Heim
MARINETTE - A group of nursing students at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College clustered around their patient, a mannequin who'd been complaining of chest pains.
As an instructor in a hidden room voiced the patient's concerns, Molly Anderson, a second-year student, showed Paige Dolata, a first-year student at UW-Green Bay's Marinette campus, how to hook up an electrocardiogram.
Anderson and two of her classmates, Katie Schwittay and Deb Gilles, coached Dolata, who will spend her second and third years of college at NWTC's nursing school, through a mnemonic they use to remember where to put the colored electrodes on a patient's chest. White to the right, clouds over grass, smoke over fire and chocolate close to your heart.
In about a month, Anderson, Schwittay and Gilles will graduate and begin their careers as registered nurses. One wouldn't know from watching them expertly place the electrocardiogram patches or quickly set up an IV drip, but the pandemic limited their early opportunities to work in hospitals and other health care settings.
"We caught up," Anderson said. "But we had to."
While nurses across the country didn't shy away from broadcasting the exhaustion, fear and trauma the pandemic brought on, the trio says the past two years haven't made them question their decisions to pursue the field. It's only made them eager to step up to the plate faster.
And they and their fellow graduates are all but guaranteed jobs — their pick of many, even — as employers clamor to bolster a shrinking nursing workforce.
In its most recent annual report, the Wisconsin Hospital Association declared the state's nursing shortage had reached its "tipping point." Hospitals were reporting vacancy rates for registered nurse positions more than twice as high in 2021 than in 2020, and turnover rates had also doubled. Nearly one in five nurses decided to change jobs last year.
Health care worker churn is happening across the country. In Wisconsin, an aging population will need an increased number of health care services in the years to come, making nurses — who comprise more than half of the state's hospital workforce — highly sought-after.
Registered nurses rank high among the state's hottest jobs in a list compiled by the Department of Workforce Development of occupations with the highest projected growth.
Employers are reaching out in increasing numbers to recruit nursing students at NWTC, said Brian Krogh, the school's associate dean of health sciences. Many of the students who will graduate in May have already secured jobs.
That includes Anderson, of Porterfield, who will work nights in the emergency room at the hospital in Marinette, and Schwittay, who'll continue her current employment at Bellin Health's clinic in Daggett, Mich., near Stephenson, where she lives. There, she said, she likes that everyone knows her well enough to ask about her kids' day at school.
Gilles, of Wausaukee, who came to nursing as a second career after 26 years in finance, said she's keeping her options open.
"There's a lot of nursing opportunities out there, between the hospital, clinics, public health," she said. "I'm undecided at this point."
Other nursing schools are seeing similarly high demand for their students.
Matt Rentmeester, vice president of marketing and admissions at Bellin College in Green Bay, said he's never seen so many offers given to students before graduation.
"I cannot put them out fast enough, our graduates," Rentmeester said.
One Bellin College student who'll graduate this year has her choice of offers from health systems in Green Bay, Wausau and Milwaukee, he said.
Another who graduated last year received an offer with a sign-on bonus of an amount that he called "shocking." During the heights of virus surges in 2020 and 2021, some health systems were offering bonuses upward of $10,000.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison's school of nursing, Associate Deans of Academic Affairs Barbara Pinekenstein and Lisa Bratzke said several students graduating this year had already accepted job offers at the end of the fall semester.
Admissions applications are also starting to stack up. Though it may be too soon to tell if the pandemic has caused more people to be interested in nursing as a career, Rentmeester said 367 people applied for Bellin College's undergraduate and graduate nursing programs for the upcoming fall, up from a usual of about 320 pre-pandemic.
Demand for the nursing program at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh has also been growing slightly. There were 157 applicants for the spring 2022 semester, up from 126 applicants in spring 2019, according to data from the College of Nursing.
But program spots are limited at some schools. At UW-Madison, Pinekenstein and Bratzke said, there are regularly two or three applicants for each seat. The same is true to the west, at the University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire, where the dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences told USA TODAY Network-Wisconsin last year that the college has to turn away at least as many applicants as it's able to admit.
Nationally, more than 90,000 qualified applicants to nursing schools were turned away in 2021, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
That's a problem caused in part by the limited number of clinical opportunities for students at local hospitals, but also by faculty shortages. Nurses in academia typically earn less than those in clinical settings.
At NWTC, Anderson discovered she had a knack for teaching others. Though she'll begin her career in the ER — a place she said she loves for its fast pace and need for critical thinking — she said she ultimately wants to teach nursing at the college someday.
She and her classmates credited their teachers for helping them navigate the challenges of completing nursing school during a pandemic. They missed some opportunities in their first year to gain real-world experience, like a clinical rotation at a nursing home, and did more work on mannequins or using online simulations than is typical.
"I don’t think any of us felt like we were comfortable and felt like we had the learning we should have had that first year," Gilles said, but instructors took note and tweaked their lesson plans to give them extra practice before they had to work at the hospital.
Despite concerns that the pandemic could discourage people from wanting to pursue nursing, Anderson, Gilles, Schwittay and Dolata agreed that it only made them more sure of their career path — and that they wished they were already out in the field to provide reinforcements for depleted staffs.
Safety protocols prevented them from working directly with COVID-19 patients and they didn't get a chance to assist with a vaccine clinic, but still, they said, the pandemic has shaped their approach to nursing.
"It's made me aware that I need to be self-aware of my own mental health during this process, and not burn myself out," Anderson said.
At Bellin College, some students did get the chance to work with COVID patients, Rentmeester said.
The school went virtual for a short time after the onset of the pandemic, but brought students back soon after. Any delay was going to limit their ability to graduate and join a workforce sorely in need of more hands on deck and more optimism, Rentmeester said.
"We were the cavalry," he said.
Contact reporter Madeline Heim at 920-996-7266 or mheim@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @madeline_heim.