MCC expands school's nursing program
BY JAY BODAS
Staff Writer

EDISON - A collaboration between Middlesex County College and Raritan Bay Medical Center will ease the demand for slots in the school's nursing program.

The new program will eventually admit 110 students each year.

"We had 600 applications for 40 slots this year," said Gerald Ostrov, chairman of the MCC Board of Trustees. "We had this funnel with a big block in the middle, and so I am really glad we are addressing that block so that people can come here to become a nurse."

The number of students in MCC's nursing program is expected to increase from 40 this year to 70 students next fall, followed by a projected 110 students in every class thereafter.

"We have all read in the last few years of the critical shortage of nurses," MCC President Joann LaPerla Morales said. "But we don't have a shortage of nursing candidates, as they are at our doors. This year we had 600 students who wanted to be nurses, and so the real shortage is in faculty and clinical placements."

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that jobs for registered nurses will grow 23 percent by 2008, faster than all other occupations. By 2020, it is projected that there will be a nursing shortage of 800,000 jobs.

"A year-and-a-half ago, we began to see how we could look into a collaborative, and with the help of Freeholder John Pulomena and the support of Freeholder Director David Crabiel, we came to an agreement to form this Joint Nursing Program, which will admit not the current 40 students but 110 students annually," she said.

The new collaboration will replace the college's currently existing Joint Nursing Program with University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ).

"UMDNJ is very much interested in concentrating on their baccalaureate and graduate degree programs, and less so on the associate degree program," said MCC spokesman Tom Peterson.

Students in the program now take courses on the MCC campus taught by both college and UMDNJ faculty, which are followed by additional courses and clinical experiences at UMDNJ's hospitals.

Graduates of the class of 2008 are in the final year of that collaboration, said Dr. Karen Hays, vice president of student and academic affairs at MCC.

"We will be working with UMDNJ this year and next year, but we will not admit another class into that program," Hays said. "The next class we admit will be with Raritan Bay, though both programs lead to an associate degree in nursing."

In the new collaboration with Raritan Bay Medical Center, nursing students will complete 35 credits in general education and science taught by MCC faculty followed by 35 credits in nursing taught by Raritan Bay faculty. They would also undergo clinical experiences at Raritan Bay's Old Bridge and Perth Amboy hospitals.

The associate degree would be from MCC, and graduates will receive their nursing pin from Raritan Bay, said Peterson.

"One distinct advantage is that future nurses would receive their clinical experiences at Raritan Bay, which is a Magnet hospital," Peterson said. "The Magnet designation, awarded by the American Nurses Credentialing Center for Nursing Excellence, is granted to less than 3 percent of all hospitals in the nation."

Raritan Bay currently has its own independent three-year nursing diploma program, which will be phased out to make way for the new collaborative with MCC.

Michelle Foley, director of nursing education at the Charles E. Gregory School of Nursing at Raritan Bay, said that all of her faculty members have a master's in nursing, and 99 percent are nationally certified.

"I look forward to producing excellent nurses, as we have produced at my school of nursing for the last 103 years," Foley said.