Dr. Nurse by Dominique A. Tobbell;

Author:Dominique A. Tobbell; [Tobbell, Dominique A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MED000000 MEDICAL / General, MED039000 MEDICAL / History, SOC028000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies, MED058000 MEDICAL / Nursing / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

State nursing workforce and health care needs were thus critically embedded within nursing’s academic project. Over the course of the 1970s, in states throughout the U.S., health planners and policymakers worked with state-funded nursing schools to facilitate educational mobility for graduates of LPN, diploma, and AD programs; to develop and expand nurse practitioner programs; and to increase the number of qualified nursing faculty in the state. These examples reveal the ways in which state policymakers looked to state-funded AHCs and the health professional schools within them to produce enough of the “right type” of health care professionals willing to work in underserved regions of the state. These examples also make clear the tensions that characterize state-funded nursing schools and the AHCs of which they are part: tension with the states that fund them, the state and federal health policies that direct them, and the professional and educational imperatives of their constituent faculty.

As nursing schools and nursing organizations worked to resolve some of the difficulties of educational mobility for diploma and AD-trained nurses, debates over those measures—and about the merits of maintaining multiple educational pathways into nursing—continued. Nevertheless, nursing leaders were unwilling to give up the multiple pathways for entry into practice because of the stakes involved for those institutions currently preparing nurses at the diploma, AD, and BSN level, and for the nurses who earned these degrees—and because the multiple pathways into practice enable social mobility for “nurses who may have chosen the wrong path for entry into nursing, or who now have the resources to pursue advanced education.”167 Indeed, by the early 2000s, the importance of those multiple pathways to increasing the diversity of the nursing workforce and to improving access to higher levels of education particularly among underrepresented populations, were readily apparent. As historian Patricia D’Antonio has documented, the “numbers of nurses earning a bachelor’s degree or higher over a lifetime rose from 9 percent in 1960 to 47 percent in 2004,” which far exceeds the proportion of American women in general who earned baccalaureate degrees over their lifetime through 2004. “The advantages accrued to American nurses of color,” D’Antonio continues, “are even more pronounced.” Although data on the numbers of women of color earning baccalaureate degrees prior to the civil rights movement is problematic, D’Antonio writes, “data from both 2000 and 2004 suggest that the current proportion of nurses of color with bachelor’s degrees earned over a lifetime is greater than that for white nurses, still the predominant group of American nurses.” For example, “in 2004, only 46 percent of white nurses had earned a bachelor’s degree at some point in their lives. By contrast, 52 percent of African American nurses and 72 percent of Asian or Pacific Islander nurses could point to such an accomplishment. Hispanic nurses match their white colleagues at 46 percent.”168 More recent government data confirms that nurses of color “are slightly more likely than their white counterparts to obtain a baccalaureate or higher degree during their careers.”169

In the early 2000s, the entry into practice debate took on a new spin.

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