With nearly 39,000 nurses in Alabama expected to leave the profession in the next four years, the Alabama Board of Nursing discussed several topics Monday that they hope will recruit more nurses ahead of the looming workforce exodus.
“We will have nurses coming in, but we’re going to have a much younger workforce, and if we don’t develop that pipeline now and streamline how to get them in, then in four years from now, we may be in trouble,” said Peggy Benson, ABN executive director at a meeting of the board’s advisory council.
Among the topics discussed included expanding an incentive program for nurse educators and revamping the Alabama Community College System’s Concept Based Nursing Curriculum, which was last updated in 2016.
Framework for nursing education
A framework for nursing education employed at the state’s community colleges, the Concept Based Nursing Curriculum remains an effective tool, said Kenneth Kirkland, council chair and dean of health sciences at Calhoun Community College. Though in some cases it has become antiquated, particularly as it relates to nursing support technicians, he said.
“… We’ve created so many offramps out of our nursing curriculum through stackable credentials like the NSTs, nurse aid (and) medication aid (that) it’s time to go back and reevaluate whether those still align with where our curriculum is,” Kirkland said.
There are as many as 14,000 NSTs in Alabama, each of whom work in specialties such as patient care technicians or medical technicians, and must work under the supervision of nurses at all times. The ABN recently launched a new certification process where NSTs would be regulated and certified by the ABN under a uniform process, which Benson named as another reason for needing to update nursing education in the state.
The updated curriculum, Benson told Alabama Daily News, could also be an effective tool for recruiting more nurses.
“When we’re looking at the NST, paramedics and all of these different modalities that began the education almost the same, if we can streamline those competencies in the first semester, or accept credit for that and be sure that these people are getting those competencies as well, then we create the pipeline for them to grow in the health care professions.”
Expanding loan program
Another topic the board discussed was expanding the Alabama Education Loan Repayment Program, which provides forgivable loans for nursing students who commit to work for two years as nurse educators. State lawmakers established the program in 2023, and funded it to the tune of $150,000 in fiscal year 2025.
Benson said the board will ask for that to be expanded to $450,000 for fiscal year 2027, and that the program has proved invaluable for educating nurses across the state.
“Most nursing educators, the college systems don’t pay the same as the hospital and the private sector pays, so to become an educator, you may have to take a $20,000 or $30,000 cut in pay to teach,” she told ADN. “So this is to help augment that, supplement their salary and to pay for their education.”
There are around 100,000 practicing nurses in Alabama, and a 2023 survey revealed that 38,727 nurses anticipated leaving the profession within the next five years. In the same time frame, the ABN projects there will be around 25,000 new nurse graduates for a net loss of nurses of around 13,000, further exacerbating the existing nurse shortage in the state, which exists across the nation.
While Alabama nurses receive the second-lowest pay in the nation with a median annual salary of $56,570, burnout was among the most-frequently cited reasons among nurses for indicating they planned on leaving the profession. Of the 84,779 nurses that participated in that survey, roughly 58,000 had indicated they hold a second job, 37,000 of whom spent at least 32 hours a week at that second job.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Alexander Willis and originally published by Alabama Daily News.
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