By Sara Quam
With a national nursing shortage leaving many hospitals and health agencies scrambling, local nursing students are trying to ease the shortfall.
Five of them are graduating from South Dakota State University, Brookings, this week and have already lined up jobs.
They are Jill Dorn, Adrian; Brent Konz, Adrian; Mary Moser, Hills; Ben Nelson, Luverne; and Sara Sestak, Jasper.
As part of their final semester, they worked with Nobles-Rock Public Health under Public Health Nurse Joan Kindt.
She said, "I'm happy local people are going into nursing. We need good, quality people in the field."
Kindt said that Minnesota, along with the rest of the country, has a shortage of nurses to fill positions existing and also lacks students pursuing four-year nursing degrees.
For example, Kindt said that in Minnesota, for every 10 nursing positions opened, just seven are filled.
Rebecca Mauer, a nursing instructor at SDSU, coordinates with Public Health. The relationship between the university and Public Health started six years ago when students began working on their clinicals with Public Health as part of their coursework.
Mauer said she's well aware of the nursing shortage and is also concerned about a shortage of nursing instructors. "We're a real aging profession. Our average age is pretty high," she said.
The next generation
Nursing students at Public Health do valuable work for the agency.
Each made either a presentation on bioterrorism or conducted health screenings for county employees.
Ben Nelson, a Luverne native, is one of the graduates who worked at Public Health. He is also one of a handful of male nursing students at SDSU.
This week he's in Rochester getting ready for his new job at the Mayo Clinic.
"There's a lot of opportunities in nursing," he said. "You can go wherever you want right now, and they'll do just about anything to get you to work there."
Nelson said that although there's a shortage of four-year nursing graduates, he didn't consider becoming a technical school graduate.
"There's more flexibility with the four-year degrees," Nelson said.
He said furthering his education to become a nurse practitioner is a possibility in the future. Nurses can also move into administrative positions and advance in that way.
For now, Nelson is content to be in the field he's pursued. "It was a lot of hard work and time-consuming, but I'm glad I did it," he said.
Ben is the son of Meg and Tom Nelson, Luverne.