KCET’s ‘Life & Times’ Profiles Intensive Nurse Training Program
KCET's "Life & Times" on Tuesday profiled Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles, which offers an intensive, one-year nurse training program to address a training "bottleneck," address California's nursing shortage and produce new nurses to help hospitals comply with state nurse-to-patient staffing ratio rules that are scheduled to take effect in January 2008.
KCET reports that "plenty of people" would like to become nurses and physicians and hospitals are hiring nurses "as fast as they can find them," but U.S. nursing schools "routinely" turn away applicants because of capacity limitations. The nursing program at Mount St. Mary's this year enrolled 60 students, compared to 16 students enrolled 10 years ago.
The segment includes comments from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R); Mary Wickman, chair of the college's nursing program; and students enrolled in the program (Okarski, "Life & Times," KCET, 2/1). The complete transcript is available online. The complete segment is available online in RealPlayer.