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"It was a little bit tough at first, but I got used to it," he said, shrugging.
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The 25-year-old Kenyan immigrant said the pandemic made working in healthcare stressful, but smiling from his apartment in Fitchburg via Zoom, he didn't look scared. “It was very frustrating because I had everything mapped out." “Because of COVID, they didn't know how it was going to go down,” Mburo said. John Mburo, who’s worked as a nurses aide for the past five years at Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Groton, was supposed to begin that program earlier this year. "This was a very difficult decision to make, but it's really important that students have hands-on clinical experience,” Shea said. Because of that shortage, the school postponed its licensed practical nursing program for a year because not enough internships were available for incoming students. The hitch is that it can't compete with private hospital and university salaries to attract enough faculty and administrators. Mount Wachusett sits on an old farm on the edge of Gardner, a highway pit-stop city 60 miles northwest of Boston. "There's a shortage of faculty, and we're all working on that," said Diane Welsh, president of the Massachusetts Association of Nursing Colleges.Ĭommunity colleges had to cut back nursing programs because of the pandemic and a shortage of instructors Mount Wachusett, where enrollment is down 14 percent, has nine full-time nursing professors and four openings. Massasoit's enrollment is down 19 percent because a lot of students deferred attendance as classes were postponed. Schools also face the obstacle of tighter limits on the number of student nurses allowed to do internships - which are necessary to become licensed - as hospitals operate under restricted access to their facilities to curb the spread of COVID.Īs a result of those two factors, the survey found nursing enrollment has declined at eight of the state's 15 community colleges: Mount Wachusett, Massasoit in Brockton, Roxbury, Middlesex in Lowell and Bedford, North Shore in Danvers and Lynn, Northern Essex in Haverhill, Springfield Technical and Berkshire in Pittsfield. The American Association of Colleges of Nurses reports the national vacancy rate for nursing faculty jobs was 8 percent this year, up from 6 percent last year. One reason for that gap between demand and availability is that most of the state's community colleges had to cut or limit their nursing programs, partly because of a shortage of instructors. Some Students Take A Second Look At Community CollegesĬommunity Colleges Scramble To Recapture Students Lost in Pandemic Med Schools Are Seeing A Surge Of Applications. In fact, there appears to be more student interest in nursing programs than there is capacity. Kim Shea, dean of nursing at Mount Wachusett. “You would think, ‘Oh, geez, you know, big, scary pandemic, we want to stay away from that.’ That is actually not the case," said Dr. That enrollment pattern is a hopeful sign considering that even before COVID, economists forecast that Massachusetts would be short 14,000 nurses by 2024. Northeastern University in Boston and Merrimack College in North Andover declined to participate in the survey. But it's a different story at most of the state's community colleges, which are struggling to keep pace with schools that offer four-year bachelor degree programs.Ī GBH News survey found that overall enrollment this fall is up about 4 percent from 2019 levels, based on responses from 39 of the state's 41 nursing programs. While the prolonged battle against COVID is leading more nurses to retire and exacerbating the existing shortage, nursing schools in Massachusetts are maintaining their overall enrollment amid the challenges of fewer nursing instructors and internships. "It really felt good helping those people, and they'd say 'thank you' to you, with all this oxygen hooked up to them,” said Jones, 22, who is also a nursing student at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner. Throughout the pandemic, Emily Jones has been working with COVID-19 patients as a medical assistant at Lahey Hospital in Burlington, Massachusetts, an experience that she says has only heightened her interest in more schooling to become a nurse.