![]() They discuss ways to address nurse dissemination of COVID-19 misinformation. The members brainstorm ways to promote nurse wellness and curb the long-term effects of compassion fatigue on the healthcare workforce. The work of the Partnership goes on it continues to look at new ways to address the nurse supply and demand gap. The group found the Partnership’s collaboration to be extremely impactful at local levels. As data from its APP pilot program came in, Oklahoma Christian University shared the results with the group so others could learn from its successes. Hospitals such as Norman Regional Hospital shared their Memorandum of Understanding templates for their partnerships. Members took the OU APP model and replicated it with their local partners. The Partnership became a place where leaders could share ideas about how to form successful APPs in their communities. Of all the Partnership’s ideas, the APPs got the most traction.Īs more industry leaders learned about APPs, more members joined the Partnership to find out how their entities could benefit. They followed the letter up with meetings with the governor’s office and state health officials then held joint press conferences to plead their case to the public. In November 2020, the group amassed all their strategies in a letter to Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, with APPs serving as the centerpiece of all the strategies, in hopes of garnering his support. Finally, and most importantly, they saw the success of a pioneer APP between OU Medicine and The University of Oklahoma College of Nursing and wished to use it as a model across the state. They envisioned the creation of a nurse extender position in hospitals made up of staff who have been away from the bedside for years. They revamped the state’s Nurse Refresher program to a competency model thus reducing the amount of time and cost for the program for those wishing to get back into nursing. They thought a governor-directed executive order could remove obstacles for inactive nurses to get their licenses reinstated and entice them back to the workforce. They suggested that the State of Oklahoma could use Cares Funds to contract with a company like MatchWell to crowdsource nurses and other healthcare workers. This group became a brain-trust and spawned even more ideas to get hospitals the help they desperately needed. Since in-person meetings were no longer a possibility, the group met virtually to brainstorm solutions beyond APPs that could immediately impact the nursing shortage. The Oklahoma Academic-Practice Partnership quickly got to work in the midst of the pandemic. Oklahoma nursing leaders envisioned the program as a way to extend nurses' arms at the bedside and ensure that these students received the required clinical experience, and a new emphasis on promoting APPs in Oklahoma was born. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing has long favored APPs to help develop nursing students’ critical thinking and NCLEX pass rates. ![]() ![]() APPs consist of a nursing school and a health care organization partnering to provide prelicensure nursing students employment in healthcare while simultaneously earning school credit for clinical experience. When the pandemic exacerbated the shortage, the group pivoted to laser-focus the use of Academic-Practice Partnerships (APPs) towards staffing hospitals as a direct result of COVID-19. The ONA, Oklahoma Organization of Nurse Executives, and Schools of Nursing Education Deans and Directors collectively formed the Oklahoma Academic-Practice Partnership in response to the nursing shortage well before COVID-19 reared its head. Oklahoma nursing leaders learned partnerships were key to finding solutions to shortages. This dire situation is spurring nursing leaders to come together and create solutions, knowing full-well that a failure to act would negatively affect patient outcomes. Others were enticed to leave the state by higher wages in other places or entered travel nursing contracts outside of Oklahoma the state’s hospitals now find their nursing vacancies at a critical level. Exhausted nurses chose to leave the workforce in favor of retirement, a different career path, or just plain old unemployment so they could care for their families. In the early 2000s, the Oklahoma Nurses Association (ONA) and Oklahoma Hospital Association were building task forces with the sole purpose of addressing the gap between RN supply and demand, an issue they never fully resolved. Long before the pandemic, Oklahoma was struggling with a shortage of registered nurses (RNs). She is a member of the Oklahoma Academic-Practice Partnership and has spearheaded partnerships with local nursing schools for her organization. Lea Brown MSN, RN, NPD-BC is the Education Coordinator for Stillwater Medical in Stillwater, OK.
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