The National Academy of Medicine’s “Future of Nursing 2020-2030” report charts a path past the pandemic for every type of nurse, including those within the skilled nursing spectrum, with a focus on health equity.
The term refers to an effort to make sure everyone is getting access to a healthy lifestyle, including health care professionals, healthy food, and a safe living environment, among other socioeconomic factors.
Health equity is achieved in part when more people of color join the health care workforce, the report said, an endeavor that is still severely lacking in positions of power within the industry and career paths that require more training and education.
“For all of us who are in nursing education, we need to go back right now and relook at all our admission policies,” said Catherine Alicia Georges, professor and chairperson of the Department of Nursing at Lehman College of the City University of New York. “I want to tell you about the school who, when I was a student, wanted me to send a picture so they could decide if they would accept me … that’s the way admission policies were years ago. Now we don’t have pictures but we have some other things that we have set up as barriers that, as Dr. Hassmiller said, must be broken down.”
Georges on Wednesday spoke at a virtual panel discussing the report, an event hosted by the Columbia University School of Nursing.
Other panelists included: Susan Hassmiller, senior scholar in residence at the National Academy of Medicine; Patricia Pittman, professor of health policy and management at George Washington University; Dr. Jack Rowe, professor of health policy and aging at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health; and Victoria Tiase, director of informatics strategy at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
In a section specific to SNFs, the report found that a large proportion of black and African American people work as licensed practical nurses, personal care aides and nursing assistants, and that the number of these positions far exceeded positions that require more education (and demand more pay), like a registered nurse.
About 37% of home health aides and nursing assistants in SNFs were identified as black out of five demographic sections: white, black, asian, hispanic and other; 30% of licensed vocational nurses and personal care aides were black.
By comparison, 19% of registered nurses working at SNFs were black, compared to 67% white RNs. Total number of home health aides, nursing assistants, licensed vocational nurses and nursing assistants was 877,653, while registered nurses made up 237,230 of SNF staff.
These statistics were gathered over a five-year period, from 2014 to 2018.
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