Beaumont-Spectrum gives $20 million to Oakland University to educate more nurses

BHSH System, the parent company of Beaumont Health and Spectrum Health, announced Thursday it will provide $20 million to Oakland University to educate nurses in the hopes of alleviating a shortage. 

The state's largest health system will invest $10 million toward student grants and $10 million over the next five years to expand infrastructure, including labs, classrooms, equipment and faculty, the organizations said in a press release.

"The nursing shortage in our state is a critical and complex challenge that must be solved with bold and collaborative solutions," Tina Freese Decker, president and CEO of BHSH System, said in a press release. "We are proud of our long-standing partnership with Oakland University and to have this amazing opportunity to invest in talented, compassionate people who want to become nurses. We are incredibly excited about the impact the BHSH Beaumont Health Nurse Scholar program will have in healthcare and for our communities."

Students that receive a grant in the program will be required to work for BHSH for two years following graduation.

Hospitals and healthcare providers across the state have been suffering from a lack of nurses for years, but that problem was exacerbated during the pandemic when many nurses left the field. Roughly one-in-five healthcare workers left or retired from the field between the start of the pandemic in 2020 and November 2021, according to a survey from research company Morning Consult.

There are thousands of open nursing positions across the state — more than 12,000 are currently being promoted on jobs site Indeed.com.

Nursing faculty at University of Michigan wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year that the shortage is largely caused by unsafe working conditions at hospitals as the result of too large patient-to-nurse ratios and a severe lack of nurse education programs.

"Many nursing schools must cap enrollment due to shortages of qualified faculty to teach in undergraduate and graduate programs," UM Nursing School faculty Deena Kelly Costa and Christopher Freese wrote in a Q&A with the university. "And more than a third of current nursing faculty plan to retire in the next few years, which will worsen the bottleneck. It can be challenging to attract experienced nurses to teach in associate or bachelor degree programs since often the schedule and pay aren't as competitive as full-time clinical positions. This hurts our ability to grow the supply of high-quality registered nurses. "

OU's School of Nursing has about 770 bachelor's-track nursing students in its program and graduates 350 nurses annually. The university currently admits 192 students into the bachelor's program annually and another 192 into its accelerated second degree nursing program annually.

It's unclear how many nurses will be added to the program due to the investment from BHSH.

"This magnanimous gift directly responds to the need for more highly skilled nurses and the workforce shortage that has become more critical since the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic," OU President Ora Hirsch Pescovitz said in the press release.

This story first appeared in our sister publication, Crain's Detroit Business.