Year in Review 2021-2022
Care
The National Challenge: A healthcare workforce shortage, made worse by trauma and burnout in the wake of the pandemic, poses one more barrier to treatment, prevention and wellness. While RFU continues to develop innovative ways to attract, educate and build a diverse, highly skilled and compassionate healthcare and biomedical workforce, employers are wrestling with both existing and looming shortages of physicians, pharmacists and entry-level healthcare workers such as medical assistants, home health aides and nursing assistants.
Nowhere is the shortage more critical than in nursing, the largest share of the healthcare workforce, where a 2022 McKinsey Report projects a deficit of 200,000 to 450,000 registered nurses for direct patient care by 2025. By 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nation will need 1.1 million new registered nurses.
“We are seeing a labor market shortage that we’ve never seen before in health care,” said Gabrielle Cummings, FACHE, president of Legacy NorthShore Acute Care Operations and Highland Park Hospital. “It’s been a challenging environment to hire nurses, advanced-patient practitioners and technicians. A lot of it is related to COVID and COVID burnout. But people are also deciding they want to do different things with their life.”
Effects of the pandemic will likely persist, according to a 2022 issue brief by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Health Policy, with nursing shortages intensified by an aging workforce and lack of training capacity.
That poses a threat to progress on health equity. Nurses are leaders in holistic care. Powerful advocates for patients and families, they are well-prepared to lead the development of more equitable models of care, especially in communities with the greatest need.
RFU’s College of Nursing — the first in Lake County — will graduate diverse, highly-educated nurses, who will take on new and expanded roles that will help transform the delivery of care.
RFU Action
College of Nursing
Rosalind Franklin University is building its new College of Nursing (CON) with the community and for the community — with care in mind.
“It’s care for each other, it’s care for our clinical partners and it’s care for our community,” said Founding Dean Sandra Larson, PhD, CRNA, APRN, FAANA, FNAP.
CON is initially offering two degree programs — a Master of Science in Nursing for Entry into Nursing Practice (MSN-ENP) and a blended virtual and in-person Doctor of Nursing Practice: Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (DNP-PMHNP). The college is rooted in the philosophy that highly-educated nurses need a strong foundation in the liberal arts to offer holistic and interconnected care to patients, families and the community — care that applies knowledge of climate science, public policy development, social justice, languages, fine arts, evidence-based practice, literature and computer science, in addition to critical nursing theories and the basic sciences.
The college is partnering with local and regional health systems to help address their nursing workforce needs.
“It starts with bringing together sectors involved in health care and learning about their unique challenges and doing our part to support them in meeting those challenges — first and foremost through the way we educate, but also in the way we leverage resources,” Dr. Larson said.
The DNP: PMHNP program will increase access to mental health in Lake County, where families may face traveling to Chicago or Milwaukee for care. Long waits for outpatient appointments are the norm, even for post-hospitalization visits following attempted suicide, according to Christopher Reddin, PhD, PMHNP‑BC, APRN, founding chair and director of the program.
“Lake County is a mental health desert,” Dr. Reddin said. “We’re educating confident, practice- and board certification-ready doctoral prepared psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners, to be exceptional clinicians, translational scientists and mental health leaders for Lake County. Following graduation and certification, they will be able to see a full patient caseload, with little lead-up time. Our students will be prepared for the realities and practicalities of practice during their clinical residency. The goal of mental wellness is hard work for both the patient and provider.”
An equity-building feature of the college is a three-phase Nursing Education to Workforce Pathway, designed in partnership with Lake Forest College and the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. The pathway will identify diverse students interested in practicing in their home communities and mentor and guide them through degree completion.
“We want to graduate MSNs and DNPs who are well prepared to provide the quality of care that Lake County needs, and to start their careers at the top,” Dr. Larson said.
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“It’s care for each other, it’s care for our clinical partners and it’s care for our community.”
Community. Care. Connection.
Philanthropic Response
Dr. Scholl Foundation
A key innovation in the College of Nursing will guide students in the practice of empathy, the ability to understand the feelings of others, to stand in their patients’ shoes and view situations from their perspectives.
The Dr. Scholl Foundation Empathy Lab will help nursing students practice empathy through both physical and virtual interactions and tools, including aging-simulation suits and virtual reality goggles that simulate disease states. Students will participate in exercises across the entire curriculum that help them understand the patient and their diagnosis from the patient perspective. They will also use computer programs that simulate the social determinants of health.
“Students who experience how it feels to navigate the world with physical, mental and economic obstacles become better equipped to provide and advocate for empathetic, patient-centered care,” said Lori Thuente, PhD, RN, founding chair for the MSN for Entry into Nursing Practice program.
One of very few of its kind in the country, the lab is funded as part of a $1 million gift by the Dr. Scholl Foundation that addresses areas of need across the university, also including nursing and podiatric medical student scholarships and equipment for our Dr. William M. Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine clinics and Center for Lower Extremity Ambulatory Research (CLEAR).
“The Empathy Lab is an innovative approach to helping students develop a competency so crucial to healing,” said RFU Trustee Pamela Scholl, chairman and president of the foundation. “It will also encourage interprofessionalism and curricular innovation. We are proud to be able to support the College of Nursing at Rosalind Franklin University.”
Studies show that the practice of empathy is essential for high-quality health care, especially for patient-centered nursing care, which hinges on relationships. Empathetic behaviors contribute to higher levels of patient and provider satisfaction, improved team collaboration, improved patient outcomes and a decrease in provider burnout. Studies also show that empathy is more than an innate trait or soft skill.
Dr. Thuente, who is leading the design of the center, has been seeking input from experts across the globe, including a leading nurse and healthcare researcher, Tracy Levett-Jones, PhD, with the University of Technology Sydney. Dr. Levett-Jones has developed a model to support the development of empathy in nursing students through experiential learning and reflective practice.
“Empathy exists on a continuum, from self-empathy to having empathy for others,” Dr. Thuente said. “One in four students comes in with some form of childhood trauma. We will teach them to have self-empathy so they can have empathy for others.”
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“The Empathy Lab is an innovative approach to helping students develop a competency so crucial to healing.”
