Bill Takes Aim at Rural Health Care

By Marks, Joseph

Two members of North Dakota’s Senate Human Services Committee are drafting a UND-inspired bill that would help train rural residents to fill small-town health care needs.

Sen. Judy Lee, R-West Fargo, chairwoman of the committee, and Sen. John Warner, D-Ryder, are cosponsoring a bill that will provide about $2.6 million in funding to train emergency medical technicians and licensed practical nurses in rural communities to become registered nurses or otherwise move up the career ladder.

Warner said the bill also would target rural residents with other backgrounds, such as business and farming, who might be interested in moving into the field. He said the bill would be introduced before the end of the week

“It’s hard to get a 22-year-old single person to move to a small area if they have no connection there,” Lee said. “But you’ve got people in those rural areas who are unemployed or looking for a career shift. In essence, we’d be growing our own in these rural areas.”

Mobile classroom

The bill’s central feature is a large bus filled with medical training technology and lifelike mannequins that would jet back and forth between the state’s hospitals and nursing campuses, serving as a mobile classroom for students.

UND College of Nursing Dean Chandice Covington proposed the project to legislators and helped organize the proposal with officials at eight other nursing programs in the state. She said the mobile health unit carries a hefty price tag, but would cost significantly less than developing training facilities at all of the state’s nursing campuses.

She said the mannequins, which run to $250,000 each, would provide a state-of-the-art training experience that none of the state’s nursing programs could afford on its own.

“People think of mannequins, and they think of those things in stores you put clothes on,” Covington said. “But these are computerized, breathing, talking, blinking things. You can give them injections and check their pulse, and if you give them the wrong injection, their heart stops.”

Covington said the mobile training hospital is the second part of a three-phase plan. Phase one of the plan is a survey of 15,000 rural EMTs and nurse assistants to gauge interest in a local RN training program.

Final phase

The plan’s final phase, which is not funded in the current bill, is the development of a cadre of online and distance education nursing courses, which would reduce the amount of time any rural nursing student would have to leave his or her hometown.

During this phase, nursing programs across the state also would retool their programs so courses from different campuses could be combined toward a single degree, Covington said, and students could move easily from one rung on the health care ladder to the next.

“We’re trying everything in our power to keep (rural students) from having to move to Grand Forks for two years,” Covington said. “These are older students who are already out and working. They have a few kids, and they need to integrate this into their life in a rural community.”

Phase 3 of the plan would cost about $2.5 million over three years, she said.

Covington said the state’s nursing shortage is projected to grow to 5,000 nurses by 2020, and that shortage will be felt most in the state’s rural areas.

“I’m really impressing upon people this is a little costly at first,” Covington said. “But think about one nurse providing care for 1,000 people annually, Take 100 of those, and you can see how quickly that pays back.”

Copyright Grand Forks Herald Inc. Jan 17, 2007

(c) 2007 Grand Forks Herald. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.