Kaiser Grants $6M to Ease Nursing Shortage
By Kathy Robertson
November 15, 2006
Sacramento Business Journal
Kaiser Permanente has awarded a total of $6 million in grants to two schools and a Hispanic college fund to increase the number of nurses in the work force.
The grants include $150,000 in scholarship support to Samuel Merritt College's accelerated bachelor of science nursing program in Sacramento. The first class of about 24 students will start January 2, 2006.
The grants, to be made over a period of five years, are part of a $20 million fund established by Kaiser to train more than 700 new nurses in Northern California by the end of 2010.
The idea is to train nurses for the workforce and to motivate those who wish to go into master's and doctoral programs that will qualify them to teach others, Norrish said.
Every region in the state will face a shortage of registered nurses by 2012, according to a recent report by the Center for California Health Workforce Studies at the University of California San Francisco.
Demand already exceeds supply and it's expected to increase due to an aging population. Many nurses are retiring and there are not enough qualified programs to train new ones.
The six-county Greater Sacramento region -- defined as Sacramento, Placer, Yolo, El Dorado, Yuba and Sutter counties -- has a shortage of 585 full-time registered nurses now, according to the study. That figure is expected to mushroom to a shortage of 4,200 nurses by 2020.
In addition to the grant to Samuel Merritt's Sacramento campus, the current round of funding from Kaiser includes:
- Almost $5.5 million to Oakland-based Samuel Merritt College over a four-year period to expand its accelerated bachelor of science nursing program to 96 new students in San Francisco and Redwood City per year
- $150,000 in forgivable loans for 10 students pursuing a bachelor of science degree in nursing at San Jose State University
- $260,000 over three years to the Hispanic College Fund in Washington, D.C., to support 10 students pursuing either a bachelor of science or associate degree in nursing in Northern California. The students will also be part of work-study programs at Kaiser Permanente.