[WASHINGTON, DC] – U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) today announced Senate approval of his legislation to address one of the major causes of the nationwide nursing shortage – an insufficient number of nurse educators – by providing grants to colleges to improve their ability to educate nursing students. The legislation, added late last night as an amendment to the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bill, would create and fund a program modeled after the Nurse Education, Expansion, and Development (NEED) Act, which Durbin introduced on January 31, 2007.

“Nurses care for our children and grandchildren, our parents and other loved ones. We know the difference nurses make in our lives – and increasingly we are noticing the difference when we do not have enough of these dedicated men and women when we need them most,” said Durbin. “More needs to be done to boost our nursing schools in order to train the nurses we will need in the years to come.”

Durbin offered his legislation as a second degree amendment to an amendment proposed by Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). The Schumer-Hutchison amendment would allow up to 61,000 foreign nurses to enter the country as green card holders. The Durbin second-degree amendment requires each employer who successfully petitions for a nursing green card to pay a $1,500 fee. This fee would be used to fund Durbin’s NEED Act program to provide grants to U.S. nursing schools for hiring nurse faculty, expanding training capacity and recruiting more students.

“Projections show that by the year 2020, our country’s nursing shortage will have grown to 1 million. Importing several thousand foreign nurses is only a band-aid solution to this projected shortage,” said Durbin. “But it is also a step that deflates any momentum towards finding real solutions for our domestic nursing crisis. My amendment is a reasonable compromise that will help both the hospitals in the short term and the domestic nursing supply in the long term.”

Statistics paint a bleak a picture for the availability of nursing faculty now and into the future. Last year, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing surveyed more than 400 schools of nursing. They found that 66% of the schools reported vacancies on their faculty. An additional 15% said they were fully staffed but still needed more faculty to handle the number of students who want to be trained. It is expected that 200 to 300 doctorally-prepared faculty will be eligible for retirement each year from 2005 through 2012, reducing nursing faculty while the need for qualified nurses continues to increase.

In Illinois, the number of qualified applicants being denied admission to nursing schools is growing. From 2002 through 2003, there were 502 qualified students rejected from Illinois nursing schools. Last year, there were 1,900 students turned away because of lack of faculty and resources. And yet, in spite of the increasing number of eligible nursing school applicants, Illinois could be facing a shortage of over 21,000 nurses by 2020 because of a lack of nursing faculty.

Durbin’s amendment also contains two provisions to enhance global healthcare cooperation and to safeguard against a crippling brain drain of foreign healthcare workers from countries where they are critically needed.

The first provision would allow a healthcare worker who is a legal permanent resident in the U.S. to temporarily provide healthcare services in a country that is underdeveloped or that has suffered a disaster or public health emergency without jeopardizing his or her immigration status in the United States.

The second provision would require a foreigner who is petitioning to work in the U.S. as a healthcare worker to attest that he or she has satisfied any outstanding commitment to his or her own country under which the foreigner received money for medical training in return for a commitment to work in that country for a period of years. The goal of this provision is to ensure that foreign countries do not invest money in healthcare workers who then renege on commitments to work in their country without satisfying their commitment in some way, such as by a new voluntary agreement.

Durbin’s amendment is supported by the American Nurses Association and the American Association of Nursing Colleges.