LIMA — With demand growing for baccalaureate-level nurses, educational institutions are working to fill that need. On Tuesday, an area state representative learned about how Rhodes State College is hoping to address that need at its new downtown facility.
Ohio Rep. Susan Manchester, R-Waynesfield, toured Rhodes State’s Borra Center for Health Sciences, where she was able to learn more about the college’s plans to offer its own Registered Nurse to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (RN-BSN) program, offering current registered nurses with an associate’s degree the opportunity to earn a higher, more in-demand level of education.
“I’m very excited about the opportunities they have available, and I look forward to advocating on their behalf at the state level to ensure that we can continue to educate students right here in Lima and send them out into the region,” Manchester said. “We continue to talk about bringing people back to Ohio and meeting our workforce needs, and I think this program is a critical piece of that.”
While Rhodes State continues its partnership with Bluffton University and others to help their students obtain credits toward their bachelor’s degrees, this new program would allow Rhodes State students to be educated for RN licensure as well as their bachelor’s all under one roof. This change is thanks to state legislation that allows community colleges to specifically offer BSN degrees without reorganizing into four-year universities.
“We’ve been given the state approval to apply to the Higher Learning Commission to offer the RN-BSN, but we’d also like to offer prelicensure [where a student obtains a BSN without being a registered nurse],” Rhodes State Dean of Health Sciences and Public Service Angela Heaton said. “We’re working very hard with legislation, and that is why we invited Susan Manchester here, to help with that legislation to go forward with the prelicensure.”
Manchester is currently being challenged to succeed Rep. Bob Cupp, R-Lima, in the Ohio House by Lima physician JJ Sreenan, and he echoed the need for nurses while also noting that the need for workers is present throughout the healthcare industry.
“The other huge need we have is in the laboratories,” he said. “Medical technicians are even a bigger crisis than in nursing. We just don’t have the people that run the lab tests. They’re just not being trained. The average age of med techs is over 60 years old right now in the United States.”
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