Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, hosted a Nursing Workforce Roundtable. Blunt Rochester highlighted the importance of fortifying our nursing workforce. Blunt Rochester heard from Delaware experts, including U.S. Representative Sarah McBride (D-Del) and Delaware State Senator Marie Pinkney, about the health care challenges and opportunities they face in the First State. This comes as a follow up to the similar roundtable Blunt Rochester hosted in October 2022.
Since the last roundtable, Delaware has made significant progress growing the nursing workforce. However, additional efforts are needed to fill nurse vacancies that persist, support the advancement of nurses’ careers, enhance their safety, and foster their overall well-being. One of the major challenges in understanding the scope of the nursing workforce shortage is the lack of information about the landscape of nursing in the state. This makes it difficult to develop informed interventions to recruit and retain nurses.
During the roundtable, participants discussed opportunities to build the nursing pipeline by exposing children in primary and secondary education to the health care field, improving housing and childcare affordability, recruiting more nurse faculty and preceptors, and addressing burnout to get the profession of nursing back on stable footing.
The Delaware Nurses Association also announced that Delaware was accepted by the National Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers as the 49th state nursing workforce center.
Blunt Rochester has been a leading voice on addressing the nursing workforce shortage. In addition to the October 2022 roundtable, Blunt Rochester introduced the National Nursing Workforce Center Act in the 117th and 118th Congresses. In the 118th Congress, Blunt Rochester also co-led the Support Faculty and Expand Access to Nursing School Act to assist nursing schools in supporting the retention and recruitment of teaching faculty and clinical preceptors.
“Today, it’s important that we recognize the importance of nurses in our health, our wellbeing, our economy, and our quality of life. Some of the good news is that we know that the number of licensed nurses in Delaware has grown over the years,” said Senator Blunt Rochester, a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. “But there are also real reasons for concern right now. From freezes in funding to firings at the very agencies that are vital to our very being, this is a challenging time…That is why our work together is even more important now than ever.”
“Right now, 49 states have nursing workforce centers, but we need to provide them with more support and resources to ensure things like data reporting are timely and accurate, and that best practices and research are shared to make sure that we strengthen the profession and our health outcomes,” Blunt Rochester continued.
“At this moment, we not only need to grow our nursing workforce, but we also need to uplift the voices of our nurses,” said Representative McBride, who also attended Blunt Rochester’s first roundtable in 2022. “But as we build our nursing workforce, as we dive into this conversation, I am just incredibly grateful to be here at a time when we are seeing attacks on our health care professionals, when we are seeing attacks on science and health care writ large, and we are seeing attacks on the health coverage so many Delawareans rely on.”
“What…Senator Blunt Rochester, and I saw as family caregivers, what the nurses know full well, and Senator Pinkney knows working in the hospitals, is that nurses are the central nervous system of our entire health care system,” Representative McBride continued. “That means because they touch and interact with every single part, when there are shortages elsewhere, the challenge of filling that shortage often falls to nurses.”
“I must say that what you are doing to…not only make sure that we have nurses [continuing] to enter the field but remain in the field is life-changing, is so needed in our state,” said Delaware State Senator Pinkney, who chairs the State Senate’s Committee on Health and Social Services. “Thank you to our community and our stakeholders who help us make change on the state level and on the federal level. We get the credit but it’s really you guys that tell us what needs to be done and how we need to do it.”
“One of the primary reasons we’re still seeing nurses leave the health care workforce and leave particular settings is the work environment. We still have a lot of work to do to improve retention of nurses,” said Christopher Otto, Executive Director, Delaware Nurses Association & Delaware Nurses Workforce Institute. “We all know health care is complex, and when you are at the epicenter of that, at the point of care, the delivery of care…all of those complexities, all of those challenges are laid down upon the nurse, the frontline health care workers to navigate an individual’s social determinants… to meet the patient’s needs. So often, those needs go unmet and that results in the moral distress and the moral injury that builds up upon nurses when they know what they need to do but are unable, because of under-resources.”
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Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester represents Delaware in the United States Senate where she serves on the Committees on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Environment and Public Works; and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.