(Press-News.org) Ann Arbor -- While the number of graduates from family or adult nurse practitioner programs continues to rise, student applications to pediatric nurse practitioner and neonatal nurse practitioner programs are falling. Yet there is capacity in PNP and NNP training programs and unmet demand for graduates.
Researchers determined that most of the child-focused programs have vacancies in each class, even when some class sizes have already been scaled back due to the downward trend in applications.
Their findings are based on telephone surveys of directors at all PNP and NNP programs in the United States.
Both studies appear in the July issue of the Journal of Professional Nursing.
"In spite of a continuing shortage of pediatric and neonatal nurse practitioners, there is a perception there aren't enough job openings in these fields. We want prospective applicants to know there is a real need for PNPs and NNPs, and that more people need to go into these fields," says Gary Freed, M.D., M.P.H., the lead author on the studies and the Percy and Mary Murphy Professor of Pediatrics and Child Health Delivery and the founding director of the Child Health Evaluation and Research Unit.
Using self-administered surveys, researchers found that
Approximately 10 percent of PNP programs surveyed were either closed, put on hold, or did not have new graduates within the last three years.
More than 25 percent of active PNP programs did not fill all available vacancies for the class entering in 2012.
Approximately 25 percent of NNP programs surveyed have closed in recent years.
About one-third of PNP program directors reported difficulty in hiring or retaining faculty. Most also reported problems maintaining or securing new clinical sites, particularly as they compete to secure such sites with larger and growing family nurse practitioner and physician assistant education programs.
In contrast, most NNP program directors report few problems with hiring or retaining faculty. However, the majority said there is stiff competition for clinical sites for their trainees, largely due to competition from other similar programs.
Both studies conclude that greater awareness through marketing and other forms of communication are needed so prospective applicants know there are employment opportunities for graduates. For now, it looks like PNP and NNP programs are optimistic about remaining open, even with the current negative market fluctuations. But what if the downward trends continue?
"The family medicine nurse practitioner degree theoretically enables graduates to choose children or adults for their practice, but they almost all gravitate toward the care of adults leaving a shortage of nurse practitioners to care for children. More needs to be done to encourage students to pursue careers in the care of children," says Freed.
INFORMATION:
Additional Authors: for neonatal nurse practitioner educational programs study: Lauren Moran and Kelly Dunham of U-M, Leanne Nantais-Smith, Wayne State University, Kristy Martyn, Emory University; for the pediatric nurse practitioner educational programs study: Lauren Moran and Kelly Dunham of U-M, Elizabeth Hawkins-Walsh, Catholic University of America, Kristy Martyn, Emory University.
Funding: Pediatric NP: Funding was provided by a grant from the American Board of Pediatrics Foundation.
Disclosure: None
Human impact on Earth produces a unique kind of biosphere
Changes to life may be the greatest for the past half billion years
Earth may be entering a new kind of planetary state
Human beings are pushing the planet in an entirely new direction with revolutionary implications for its life, a new study by researchers at the University of Leicester has suggested.
The research team led by Professor Mark Williams from the University of Leicester's Department of Geology has published their findings in a new paper entitled 'The Anthropocene Biosphere' in The Anthropocene ...
A new study of 33 Kepler stars with solar-like oscillations to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The 33 Kepler stars have been selected for their solar like oscillations and a set of basic parameters have been determined with high precision showing that stars even older than 11 billion years have Earth-like planets.
According to lead author of the article Victor Silva Aguirre from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark: " Our team has determined ages for individual host stars before with similar levels of accuracy, ...
Marijuana is the most prevalent drug in the U.S. Approximately 70% of the 2.8 million individuals who initiated use of illicit drugs in 2013 reported that marijuana was their first drug. Despite extensive research examining potential links between marijuana use and other drug use, the literature is currently lacking data regarding which illicit marijuana users are most likely to engage in use of other illicit drugs.
A new study, published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse by researchers affiliated with New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV ...
Using the Subaru Telescope, researchers at the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Russia and Kyoto University in Japan have found evidence that enigmatic objects in nearby galaxies - called ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) - exhibit strong outflows that are created as matter falls onto their black holes at unexpectedly high rates. The strong outflows suggest that the black holes in these ULXs must be much smaller than expected. Curiously, these objects appear to be "cousins" of SS 433, one of the most exotic objects in our own Milky Way Galaxy. The team's observations ...
New research from the University of Exeter has shown that the sexually antagonistic gene for resistance to the pesticide DDT, which increases fitness in female flies but simultaneously decreases fitness in male flies, helps to maintain genetic variation. The findings contribute to the understanding of evolutionary dynamics and have important implications for pest management.
The researchers used a genetic model and multiple experimentally evolving populations of the fly Drosophila melanogaster to test whether sexual conflict can maintain genetic variation. Their findings ...
University of Southampton scientists have discovered a link between coronary heart disease and osteoporosis, suggesting both conditions could have similar causes.
In one of the first studies of its kind to use a special scanning technique, researchers found that people with a history of heart disease had substantially lower cortical volumetric bone mineral density in their wrist bone (the distal radius) than those without.
Using a state-of-the-art technique called 'high resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography', researchers from Southampton's Medical Research ...
MELBOURNE, FLA. -- A new study led by Florida Institute of Technology Professor Ningyu Liu has improved our understanding of a curious luminous phenomenon that happens 25 to 50 miles above thunderstorms.
These spectacular phenomena, called sprites, are fireworks-like electrical discharges, sometimes preceded by halos of light, in earth's upper atmosphere. It has been long thought that atmospheric gravity waves play an important role in the initiation of sprites but no previous studies, until this team's recent findings, provided convincing arguments to support that idea. ...
New research identifies the types of investors who are vigilant about corporate fraud, but finds that most of those investors are tracking the wrong red flags - meaning the warning signs they look for are clear only after it's too late to protect their investment. The work was performed by researchers at North Carolina State University, George Mason University, the University of Virginia and the University of Cincinnati.
"Individual investors get hurt if they own stock in fraudulent companies that cook the books, such as Enron," says Dr. Joe Brazel, a professor of accounting ...
This news release is available in Spanish. A technique to increase the flow of blood from the umbilical cord into the infant's circulatory system improves blood pressure and red blood cell levels in preterm infants delivered by Cesarean section, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The study, published online in Pediatrics, was conducted by researchers at the Neonatal Research Institute at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women and Newborns in San Diego, and Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, Calif. It was supported by NIH's Eunice Kennedy ...
Boston, MA -- Longer secondary schooling substantially reduces the risk of HIV infection--especially for girls--and could be a very cost-effective way to halt the spread of the virus, according to researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In a study in Botswana, researchers found that, for each additional year of secondary school, students lowered their risk of HIV infection by 8 percentage points about a decade later, from 25% to about 17% infected.
"These findings confirm what has been fiercely debated for more than two decades--that secondary schooling ...
