With the need for nurses at crisis level, new apprentice program launches in Madison
Jessica Van EgerenA job working at Madison-based UW Health while attending nursing school at Madison College. Full-time benefits and salaries. Paid time-off to attend classes. Free college tuition, books and supplies.
That's the offer on the table for those aspiring to earn a nursing degree through a recently announced, first-of-its-kind apprenticeship program in Wisconsin launching this fall. The program is designed specifically to address staffing shortages in Wisconsin that Rudy Jackson, UW Health's chief nurse executive, said have reached "crisis levels."
Apprentices will earn an associate degree in nursing through Madison College while working at UW Health hospital during the four-year program. Upon graduation and successful completion of the state boards, the apprentices will be hired as nurses by the UW.
“We need more nurses – it’s that simple,” Jackson said. “That means we need to create a supportive path for future nurses to join this rewarding profession.”
The first cohort will consist of 16 certified nursing assistants and medication assistants currently working at UW Health. Applications and testing for the first apprenticeship cohort are taking place this spring. Future cohorts will include external candidates, with cohort sizes dependent on the availability of resources and staff at Madison College and UW Health.
The program is designed specifically to support racially, ethnically and socio-economically diverse healthcare personnel.
"The program has the ability to make our workforce look more like the community it serves," Dr. Alan Kaplan, CEO of UW Health, said Thursday at an event announcing the program.
'These are not ordinary times in the healthcare industry.'
If applications to the UW-Madison School of Nursing are any indication, waitlists are the norm rather than the exception for those trying to get into nursing schools.
Megan Hinners, spokesperson for the School of Nursing, said the goal is to admit approximately 160 bachelor's degree nursing students a year. The number of applications the school receive varies from year to year, but, in general, it receives two to three applications for every spot, with enrollment limited by several factors, including faculty and clinical placement capacity.
The earn-while-you-learn model is made possible through an undisclosed "generous financial gift" from Epic, the Verona-based medical records company, to Wisconsin Medicine, the philanthropic arm of UW Health and the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. UW Health, in turn, teamed up with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and Madison College to make the apprenticeship program a reality.
Dr. Jack Daniels, Madison College president, acknowledged apprenticeship programs typically are not associated with the healthcare industry.
"But these are not ordinary times in the healthcare industry," Daniels said Thursday.
Wisconsin currently faces a deficit of more than 8,000 healthcare positions across the state, with 3,500 of them in the Madison area. That shortage could swell to a deficit of 20,000 nurses in Wisconsin by 2040, according to Amy Pechacek, secretary-designee of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. The healthcare workforce is retiring at a rapid clip and those openings are not being filled, according to a 2022 report from the Wisconsin Hospital Association. For example, vacancy rates for registered nurse positions more than doubled from 2020 to 2021, the data show. Some hospitals were offering signing bonuses, upwards of $10,000, to compete for the shrinking pool of healthcare workers.
But vacancies persist, and both patients and healthcare workers notice.
In the past year, current and former doctors and nurses at Milwaukee's Ascension Columbia St. Mary's Hospital anonymously contacted the media to detail staffing shortages that they said made them fear for patient safety. And UW Health nurses working to organize a union cited ongoing staffing shortages and high turnout of experienced nurses as reasons they wanted union bargaining power.
Nurses overworked, doctors disgusted, patients unattended: Inside Columbia St. Mary's
"There has never been a more critical time to be innovative, forward thinking and committed to those aspiring to become nurses," Daniels said. "Now, they have both a pathway and a partner."
Jessica Van Egeren is Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's enterprise health reporter. She can be reached at jvanegeren@gannett.com.