BY: CAITY COYNE – DECEMBER 21, 2023 6:00 AM
Amid ongoing staffing shortages in hospitals locally and nationwide, West Virginia State University will be launching a new nursing degree program next year.
The licensed practical nurse to Bachelor of Science in nursing pathway will be a hybrid degree program and will launch in the summer of 2024, according to a news release from WVSU.
“The new [program] is designed as a pathway for working licensed practical nurses who desire to obtain a Bachelor of Science in nursing degree,” the press release reads. “The program will feature a combination of online and face-to-face classes to allow for greater flexibility in addition to clinical rotations in acute care and community-based agencies.”
Thirty students will be admitted to the program annually, and should complete it within three years. The hope, at least for the West Virginia Hospital Association, is that some of those graduates will remain in West Virginia and help to fill gaps in the state’s workforce.
Jim Kaufman, executive director for the West Virginia Hospital Association, said shortages in the health care industry are widespread, not just in the nursing field.
“Nursing, that’s the poster child and the one we talk about a lot, but it’s everyone,” Kaufman said. “It’s EMS, radiology, respiratory therapists. Nursing gets a lot of attention because it’s critical, it’s the backbone of health care, but this is happening in every profession across the board.”
In West Virginia, Kaufman said there are currently about 4,000 vacant positions at hospitals statewide. About 3,000 of those vacancies are in nursing.
“One of the biggest challenges we have in West Virginia is that these health care professionals could go anywhere in the country. They could go anywhere and probably make more money than here,” Kaufman said. “It’s great that these schools are producing and creating more slots for the professions but we need to retain those people when they graduate, and that has proven to be difficult.”
West Virginia already suffers from a population drain, often affecting highly educated and qualified professionals — teachers, doctors, engineers and more — who can earn a higher salary doing the same work in nearby states.
Currently, the state is only able to staff about two-thirds of its licensed hospital beds, Kaufman said. When there is a dearth of qualified health care workers, patients may see longer wait times for care, longer referral periods and more.
“A patient that needs a bed is going to get it, but a lower acuity patient is going to be sitting in the emergency room for longer,” Kaufman said. “It’s a matter of the workers who are there making the decisions of who to prioritize, and the people who need immediate care are going to get a bed, but for others it may take longer.”
Part of the challenge with retaining adequate staffing levels in hospitals boils down to the reimbursement system for procedures and services provided to patients who are government payers, meaning their health insurance comes from the Public Employees Insurance Agency, Medicare or Medicaid. In West Virginia, about 75% of insured people are government payers.
Kaufman said the reimbursement rate for medical care with these patients is lower than in other states, meaning hospitals and providers receive less compensation for services rendered, which translates to lower salaries.
In the 2023 regular session, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 268, which increased reimbursement rates for certain kinds of payers up to 110% of the Medicare rate. That bill went into effect immediately after passage, with the changes adopted on July 1 as the new fiscal year began.
“That was a big adjustment. Before, PEIA was paying hospitals just 50% of what Medicare paid. If a patient went out of state for service with their same insurance, wherever they were treated would receive four times more than what our hospitals would get here for the same care,” Kaufman said. “So now, yes, it’s a lot better than where we were before, but now the question remains: how do we make sure our hospitals continue to have the resources to increase their staff salary, to recruit and retain their workforce?”
This coming legislative session, which starts Jan. 10, Kaufman said he’s hoping to see lawmakers adopt a few bills that, while not directly increasing pay for hospital workers, could incentivize them to keep their talents in West Virginia.
One of those initiatives would, if passed, make it illegal for people to dox health care workers, meaning there would be charges or fines for anyone who publicly posts information about workers with the intent to harass them.
The state of Colorado adopted a similar law protecting public health professionals in 2021 in response to threats made regularly during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, Colorado lawmakers expanded the bill to cover all health care workers, Child Protective Service employees as well as code enforcers. Kaufman said advocates are using that to model their own legislation specific to West Virginia. It’s unclear exactly what the potential bill would outlaw or who would be protected by it.
“We’ve certainly seen situations where health care providers have been harrassed for doing their jobs, and that is not something we feel we should allow,” Kaufman said. “We want to make sure that as we recruit and retain workers, we can protect them. Workers look for that in their employers.”
Other subjects the Hospital Association would like to see prioritized by the Legislature include continuing to protect the state’s vaccination requirements and supporting health care workers through updates to payment models that could put more resources into hospitals.
“There is work that needs to be done and I do feel, with the support of the Legislature, we can get there,” Kaufman said.
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