April 26, 2022 – HCA Healthcare announced that it will donate $1.5 million to Florida International University’s (FIU) Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing & Health Sciences (NWCNHS) to expand its faculty and offer scholarships to increase enrollment and help address the national nursing shortage.
FIU is a federally designated Hispanic and Minority Serving Institution with a student body that is 61 percent Hispanic. One of the challenges in addressing the national shortage of nurses has been a shortage of qualified RNs to teach in nursing programs. The partnership is part of HCA Healthcare’s commitment of $10 million over three years to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) in order to advance diversity in healthcare.
According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, in 2019, U.S. nursing schools turned away more than 80,000 qualified baccalaureate and graduate nursing applicants because of an insufficient number of faculty to teach them. FIU offers three nurse educator tracks with a curriculum that was developed in compliance with the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) accreditation requirements to include expansion of clinical knowledge and skills in a specialty area of practice, as well as providing knowledge in pedagogical principles, didactic and clinical teaching strategies, and student clinical supervision experience.
HCA Healthcare’s East Florida Division has a longstanding partnership with NWCNHS dating back to 1976. In 2002, the East Florida Division paved the way for the College to launch the Foreign-Educated Physician to Nurse Program with a $1.1 million gift over four years to support implementation and promotion for the first 48 foreign-educated physicians to pursue their goal of becoming registered nurses. This pioneering program was later expanded with U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration grants, and as of 2021 has graduated 840 diverse foreign-educated physicians to registered nurses.