Nursing School Dean Jeanette Lancaster recently proposed a 30,000- square-foot addition to the Nursing School that will allow the school to enroll more students and address the pressing nursing shortage at University Hospital.
The proposed expansion of McLeod Hall, introduced at the Board of Visitors meeting, will cost an estimated $13.2 million over the next three years.
University Hospital's nursing shortage is part of a national trend in which medical facilities are struggling to retain full nursing staffs.
"We have absolutely outgrown our building," Lancaster said. "In order to take in new students we need new classroom space and room for faculty."
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The Nursing School plans to enroll 10 additional students at both the undergraduate and graduate level this fall to help alleviate the continuing shortage. A new faculty member also will be added to teach master's students.
University Hospital tends to employ roughly 40 percent of Nursing School graduates, Lancaster said.
Officials said an expansion of the Nursing School will provide more nurses for the Medical Center upon their graduation.
The administration is implementing various recruiting efforts and offering incentives to attract new students, faculty and nurses to the Nursing School and the Medical Center.
"We are concentrating on ways to improve recruiting and retention," University Executive Vice President Leonard W. Sandridge said. "We intend to provide competitive salaries and working conditions."
Nursing, a predominantly female occupation, has become a less popular career choice in recent years because of the many new career options available to women, Lancaster said.
For the past several years, the school has "vigorously" sought the employment of minority groups in nursing and is currently intensifying its efforts to promote nursing as a career for men, she said.
The nationwide shortage can also be attributed to an increasingly noticeable drop in the total number of applications to nursing schools across the country.
To combat this problem, the school is working with Virginia community colleges such as Piedmont Valley to increase applicant numbers, Sandridge said.
An aging nursing and faculty labor force further exacerbates the problem. The nationwide average age of employed registered nurses is 43.3 while the average age of the faculty is 49.
Over the next 15 to 20 years, many of those nurses will retire, and fewer nurses will be available to replace them, Lancaster said.
The challenging and increasingly "demanding work environment" of modern hospitals also contributes to the shortage, she said.
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