Addressing America’s Healthcare Human Resource Shortage: DeVry Inc. CEO Daniel Hamburger (Part 3)

SM: Can you use online tools for continuing education for nurses?

DH: Nurses who are working may have a registered nursing license, meaning they are an RN, but they do not have a bachelor’s degree. Traditionally, in nursing you could be an RN without a bachelor’s. You could do it with an associates or even a hospital-based diploma. Increasingly, hospitals want nurses with bachelor’s degrees. It turns out that the online environment is a perfect fit to solve that problem.

SM: How does that help to solve the nurse shortage problem?

DH: It helps because we need nurses trained at the bachelor’s level. Once they get their bachelor’s, many of them go on to the master’s level. We need that badly because they can then teach. One of the bottlenecks in training more nurses is the shortage of nursing faculty. We have an online bachelor’s and master’s program.

We are building more on-site campuses to help solve the nursing shortage. We have built more new campuses in the past three years than any other school.

SM: Where are your campuses?

DH: We have Phoenix; Columbus, OH; St Louis, Jacksonville, MS; and Chicago. The mayor of Chicago put a task force together to solve the nursing shortage in the city as well as to increase economic development. He encouraged us to build schools in that city. Through that partnership we are opening another new nursing campus in Chicago in July. Governments at all level are seeing education as important for education as well as economic development.

I talked to the governor of Indiana about how he would solve the nursing shortage. I mentioned that we could build a campus where we put up all the capital. We do not seek nor accept state subsidies. We can be thought of as a factory that creates jobs, and our product qualified workers for jobs. At the end of the year we pay taxes. The next day the governor had the Head of Economic Development call.

SM: What data do you have on where the nursing shortage is most acute?

DH: Across the country, but the Sun Belt in particular. California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Those are the most acute.

SM: You could proceed by building campuses all over the country and leverage an online/campus hybrid program to address the acute shortage.

DH: That is exactly right. There are many rural areas that need health care and do not have a nursing school nearby.

SM: You can’t have campuses everywhere. It seems that you are going to have to establish primary campuses and then deploy nurses from there.

DH: We hope to have them in most states. As we build them, accreditors and state licensing agencies come through and give us extremely high marks for the quality of the team, the facility, and the patient simulators. We even have a birthing simulator that has a motor inside the simulated patient which is pushing the baby out at the correct speed.

SM: Over the next 10 years, how many nurses do you estimate you will be able to train?

DH: We already have over 5,000 nursing students. I could see that value tripling over the next 5 to 10 years.

SM: What other core problems are you taking on?

DH: One goal is to use online learning to improve the quality of learning that goes on in all of our curriculum, even our medical school, which will never be 100% online. The first two years of medical school is foundational science. As our students are rotating in their clinicals during their second two years of medical school, we use online teaching methodologies to keep a standard set of curriculum that all of our students are going through.

We also use our technology to give students access wherever they are. We had an H1N1 problem where students had to stay home. Education was able to continue because they had access to all lectures and course materials. If a student is sick, we will let her stay home and still participate in the live lecture.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Addressing America’s Healthcare Human Resource Shortage: DeVry Inc. CEO Daniel Hamburger
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