NEWARK – Delaware health care leaders are moving forward on a workforce development hub that many hope will see real-time data and working facilities to address recruitment and retention issues.
U.S. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) joined dozens of professionals on a call Tuesday afternoon during Nurses Week as the Delaware Nurses Association (DNA) announced new initiatives to bring new life to the field in the First State.
Together, they launched the Delaware Nurses Workforce Institute, Inc., establishing a workforce development hub which will collect, analyze, research and report on nursing workforce data. The institute received $200,000 in state funds to build out the reporting system, with the hope of securing more federal funds.
“Nurses are literally the heartbeat of our health care system and you deserve to be invested in. The announcement that the DNA is making today will health strength Delaware’s workforce and I’m proud to help continue that work with you over the years,” Blunt Rochester told the group, applauding the recent nursing workforce development roundtable that occurred prior to this launch. “We talked about issues of burnout. We talked about issues of education and incentivizing more to go into the workforce and to go into the pipeline. But we know we need to have the best data to do that and the best information and we need to make sure that we have the resources.”
While the state touts 25,000 nurses, many more will be needed to address the current workforce shortage as the state grows, and grows older, according to DNA Executive Director Christopher Otto and other leaders like Dr. Bethany Hall-Long.
DNA also announced the launch of Delaware Nurses Foundation, Inc., which will become the philanthropic arm of the association, supporting nurses through recognition programs, mental health programs, scholarships and funding. Hall-Long will assist in launching the foundation.
“Nursing is the backbone of healthcare. We are the art, we are the science,” she said during the call, stating that a lack of support for that backbone, especially during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, caused a lot of professionals to leave the field altogether.
To Hall-Long, the individual pieces to these initiatives will be critical to maintaining the current workforce, as well as growing it more in the future while celebrating the future accomplishments of the initiatives, including a gala set for later this fall.
Delaware Nurses Workforce Institute President Dr. Stephanie McClellan added her own excitement to the mix, stating that there was “much awaited anticipation” for the launch personally and at the large.
“There’s been a lot of conversations both locally at the state and federally for getting a workforce center here in Delaware,” she said. “The launching of the institute is just the beginning of that work. We do plan to work closely with the Delaware Nurses Association to grow the size, the skill and the success of our nursing workforce and we are more dedicated to that than ever.”
The new board for the workforce institute will include 15 interdisciplinary members, bringing other groups such as the Delaware Healthcare Association and the Delaware Workforce Development Board into the fold.
The board is also working with legislature to develop a nursing advancement fund for Delaware.
“It is such an honor to lead not only nursing, but also the state of Delaware in this work. It has been a dream, a goal, a vision for a very long time. There have been many, many conversations held around this very thing and the nursing workforce institute is going to serve the needs of Delaware nurses in a way we have not yet been able to reach in Delaware and that comes in a lot of pride,” she said.
Fellow nurse and House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown also highlighted the importance of the new initiatives, encouraging the professionals on the call to “show up and speak up” and to “use your voice to speak up in rooms where decisions are being made.”
