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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Building a Sustainable Nursing Pipeline Through Education and Innovation
00:11:56
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- [00:00]
A
Hi everyone, this is Lucas Voss with Becker's Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Beckers Healthcare podcast series. Fantastic to have you. And even more fantastic to be joined by Steve Tatum. He's the Vice President of Strategic Healthcare Solutions at Orbis Education. Steve, thanks so much for being here today. It's great to have you.
- [00:16]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [00:17]
A
Yes, absolutely. I do want to start off with introductions for our audience that might not know you yet. At least if you could just tell us a little bit about your, your work in healthcare and your journey so far.
- [00:27]
B
Yeah, sure. So I actually started my career in macroeconomics and I was paying a lot of attention to demographics and I was seeing the big shifts that are coming our way and that led me to workforce and I was fascinated by the turnover and churn and the difference from generation to generation. And very quickly I noticed that healthcare had a big problem. Skilled healthcare workers are already a shortage. They've always been a shortage that has ebbed and flowed since the 80s. We noticed that it wasn't getting better, it was getting far worse. So I've spent the past 10 years at Orbis Education and now our parent company, Grand Canyon Education, working very hard to fix drastic nursing shortages.
- [01:03]
A
Yeah, it's great that you mentioned that because I want to come back to that and I was doing some research on this and. And you certainly know the numbers, right? But this was stuck out to me. The average time to recruit an experienced RN is right around the 83 day mark. And each 1% change in RN turnover can cost or save an average hospital roughly 280, which is a staggering number. And of course the 83 days as well. How can stronger partnerships between universities and healthcare organizations help build a more sustainable pipeline? Because as the numbers are telling us, it needs to be more sustainable.
- [01:42]
B
Especially out here at the Becker CEO CFO Roundtable, we're finally hearing the CFOs tuning in to some of these sort of obfuscated or layered challenges that you can't necessarily see how being short nurses is impacting the bottom line until you peel back the layers. So health systems, especially large and complex health systems, are looking for a true workforce development partner. So Grand Canyon education now has 20 partners in about 50 regional locations. So what we do is exist to scale the programs that are already in the market and their ability to meet the market demand by helping them create more workforce ready nurses. So the healthcare organizations that we're working with, they're getting access to these students while they're in the program. These Future nurses. So they have eyes on them, they're able to recruit them, they're able to inculturate and it allows them to be an active participant in the recruiting, retention and the continuing education. So overall, with all of our partners, we see a decrease in vacancies, we see a decrease in recruiting costs and a decrease in overall reliance on agency.
- [02:40]
A
So it's really a more proactive approach to this issue, which is so important, which is so such a game changer really. And you've touched on something important too, which is optimization, scalability. Right. We know that there's a lot of applicants that are well qualified, that they want to be part of healthcare in the United States, but they're turned away because there's limits. They can't find a spot, they can't even though they want to. How are you helping those partners remove some of those barriers that we're seeing right now and expand access without necessarily. Right. Sacrificing the quality and also the students, the outcomes that we want to see from folks.
- [03:21]
B
Yeah. So clinical education, especially nursing education, is incredibly tricky. 1. The cost structure is incredibly different than any other programs. It's not infinitely scalable. There are ratios, state mandated, organizationally mandated for the amount of students that can be there. For one clinical professional, it's very different. Difficult sometimes to recruit clinical professionals to teach when they could take a shift working at a higher rate. Then also there exists the issue that there are not enough MSN prepared faculty to physically educate the amount of students that would like to become nurses. So it's really a double sided problem. So we really built the organization, the company and our competencies around quality and student outcomes. We knew if we could build from there, everything would work out. So what we really specialize in is an accelerated baccalaureate nursing program. So the healthcare organizations getting the baccalaureate prepared nursing nurse that they need. In a lot of cases this student is non traditional. So we're granting an access point to a student that otherwise would not.
- [04:23]
So the accelerated program itself and the hybrid modality allow for a flexible and innovative clinical experience that it's great for the student, but also for the healthcare organization. They're able to absorb and educate far more students than they could in a typical scenario when they work with us in this model. You mentioned quality. I think it's really important, not just the quality of the student experience and the outcomes that speak for themselves, but the academic rigor needs to match, of course, that of the traditional on ground program and across all of the partners that GCE and ORBIS Support, we have NCLEX pass rates that are far above the industry standards well into the mid-90s. On top of that, when we partner with our healthcare organization, we understand that everyone wants to work with them and everybody wants to have students studying and learning in their clinical experiences and everybody would like for them to hire them. So what we do is really try to align the resources that a university and our organization already have available. So we provide continuing education resources, continuing education opportunities in many markets, especially where MSN prepared nurses are limited. We provide opportunities for a BSN baccalaureate prepared nurse to become an MSN on scholarship, while where the regulatory allows getting a waiver to teach in the program. So in that way, we're working with the healthcare organization to develop their own nurses into the future education force while we're actually fixing their bedside problem.
- [05:47]
A
Yeah.
- [05:47]
B
So it really is something that we've put a lot of thought into and our partners have been creating the Solution. So having 20 academic partners in 50 locations means that we have 50 HCO locations who are all telling us about their problems and working with us to fix them.
- [06:02]
A
Yeah, and again, it comes back to what we were talking about. It's just a more active, proactive approach to the issue, which is so, so key. And, and I think we touched on this a little bit too. We know that the workforce is changing. Right. People have more expectations, different expectations. There's a demand for more flexibility, hybrid programs. Right. That fit people that might be transitioning careers, they might be re evolving their careers. You, you mentioned you support 20 partners across more than 50 locations. And recent hybrid campus enrollment grew nearly 10%, which is significant. What design choices matter most in ensuring hands on quality and strong student support is there within these models?
- [06:41]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's a focus on the student experience. So as a result of that, when we grow and scale a program, we know that we need to get the quality right. We know that there's going to need to be an infrastructure that is designed specifically to support student success and ensure student success. So as a result, we've invested very heavily in competencies surrounding student success. Coaching, tutoring. And for all of our partners, we have a very complex and robust data analytics suite that allows us to identify potentially struggling students and deploy resources for early intervention. So, so the first thing is making sure that if a student's going to invest the time, energy and dollars to become a nurse, that we give them every possible chance to be successful and we help them avoid every potential pitfall that we've seen students go through, especially these non traditional students who might be re careering, they might be busy working adults, they probably have a lot of limitations and constraints on the way that they're able to study, perform.
- [07:38]
Secondly, it really started from the partners with whom we engaged. So the healthcare organizations and the universities that we are doing business with specifically understand that this is an academic practice partnership. So they're geared up from just, just from, from the beginning of the relationship to understand it's about innovation, it's about making changes that might require trade offs, they might be hard to adopt, and they're going to require a lot of perseverance and a lot of persistence. So most health care organizations, I would say all now, but I don't know if I can speak in a maxim that way. But most health care organizations understand there aren't enough nurses and they understand that trying to recruit from the competitor down the street is just taking from a different piece of the pie, not necessarily increasing the size of the pie. And now, especially during COVID it's revealed you cannot rely on agency nurses. It's a great steam valve for emergency, but it becomes incredibly costly very quickly. And the more reliant you are on agency nurses, the more you are beholden when we have some sort of adverse market event or something massive like the COVID pandemic. So these partners, they understand that if they want to get the non traditional students, they have to meet them where they are. So they have to meet them where they are in life, but they also have to meet them with a certain amount of flexibility that they can accommodate into their lifestyle. So most of our students are non traditional and the programs are built from the ground up to accommodate this. So when I say non traditional, they might be someone who is recurring, starting down a new career path. They might be former military looking for, you know, how they're going to come back and continue to contribute in meaningful way. In a lot of cases they are advanced transfer students who either did not understand they had a path to nursing, have accumulated the requisite credits to now get into a nursing program and don't have a space where they are from a capacity issue, or in a lot of cases there'll be a highly competitive student at an incredibly competitive nursing program. So if you have a 3, 6 and you're going into junior year and everyone in front of you has a 3.7, well, you'll make a great nurse, but you're not getting in the nursing program. So in the past it was finish your degree in something you don't want to get and then take out more loans and then go back for nursing. So these programs are really designed to say, if you have the requisite classes and coursework to be a competitive student, we will build the capacity for you.
- [09:55]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about. We talked so much about change, but I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the impact of technology and how this is all evolving in terms of shaping the future of healthcare, but specifically healthcare education and workforce development. How do you see technology evolving this.
- [10:15]
B
So technological change is a universal constant and it's accelerating and the rate at which accelerating is actually growing exponentially as well. Technology is everywhere and it's always driving the change in business and education. In the environment we're in, there's clinical limitations both in educating the nurses and also in nurses performing at the bedside that are obviously, they create ample opportunities to leverage technology. So we have invested in a lot of proprietary technology. We work with a lot of technological partners in our own shop. We do a lot of AR xr, so augmented reality, general virtual reality as a whole. And as we see the industry and the education of nurses, and particularly the NCLEX examination, moving more towards simulated experiences, we are positioning our partners to be ahead of the curve and make sure that as those changes happen, they don't experience that all too common dip in NCLEX when there's a change in the questions or the way it's performed. So technology is huge and it's ever present in our business. But I think what GCE is really able to do across our 20 partners in all these locations is to understand if we adopt a technological innovation, what is the secondary, what is the tertiary downstream impact and what will the net net be in terms of an organization's ability to build a pipeline of talent to recruit, retain and educate nurses.
- [11:34]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is certainly not simulated or augmented. Steve, it's so great to have you. Thanks for being here.
- [11:40]
B
All right, thank you for having me, Lucas.
- [11:41]
A
Yes, absolutely. It's great to see you. And again, we also want to thank you for tuning in and for Orbis Education for sponsoring today's episode. We hope you have a great rest of your day. Make sure to tune into future episodes from Becker's HealthC.
- [11:53]
B
There.