Kaiser Donations Address State Nursing Shortage

Kaiser Permanente on Wednesday donated $6 million to two schools and a Hispanic college fund to help mitigate the nursing shortage in the state, the East Bay Business Times reports (Robertson, East Bay Business Times, 11/15).

The Kaiser Permanente Fund for Health Education awarded the grants from a $20 million fund earmarked for increasing the number of nurses in the state (Oakland Tribune, 11/16). The grants are intended to train more than 700 new nurses in Northern California in the next four years.

Barbara Norrish, director of education and research at Kaiser, said that newly trained nurses also will be encouraged to pursue advanced degrees in order to teach others.

California will face a nursing shortage by 2012 because of an aging population, according to a report by the Center for California Health Workforce Studies at UC-San Francisco.

The grants will be distributed as follows:

Nearly $5.5 million will go to Samuel Merritt College in Oakland over four years to expand its undergraduate nursing program;
$150,000 in scholarship funds will go to Samuel Merritt College;
$150,000 in forgivable loans for 10 nursing undergraduates has been awarded to San Jose State University; and
$260,000 over three years will go to the Hispanic College Fund in Washington, D.C., for nursing student scholarships in Northern California (Robertson, East Bay Business Times, 11/15).

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