In 2003, the university’s Extended Studies partnered with Tri-City Medical Center and Palomar Pomerado Health Care-both located in San Diego, California-to offer local nurses the opportunity to review and update their skills in a supervised environment. With the help of refresher programs (created for nurses who kept their licenses current) and re-entry programs (created for nurses who let their licenses lapse), nurses can brush up on their skills and be ready to acclimate back into the acute clinical setting within a matter of months. “Once some of these people are out for 10 years or so it can be a scary process to come back into nursing,” said Debbie Bennett, RN, MN, director of nursing continuing education at California State University, San Marcos in San Diego, California. While patient care likely hasn’t changed since many of the nurses left the health care field, the technology, pace, medications and number of high-acuity patients requiring special attention has. As word gets out that a major national nursing shortage in the United States is expected to grow worse by 2010, many nurses who left the profession are returning to their ‘calling’ with the help of newly developed nurse re-entry programs.
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