Profit-driven managed care companies and health care networks may not want to bear the expense of training students and may start turning them away, educators say. Currently, she says, managed care organizations do not have budget lines for teaching and research. For example, in suburban Landover, Maryland outside Washington, D.C., the 31,000-member Kaiser Permanente Medical Center also serves as a training site for senior nursing students from Howard University who are paired with a nurse manager, sit in on nurse management meetings, and are supervised on clinical rounds by a staff preceptor. Whenever nurse practitioner faculty are contracted to manage a facility's care, undergraduate and graduate students are assigned, as well. Investing in a Future Nurse Supply With no managed care content in its curriculum, the University of Minnesota medical school has been exploring with nursing dean Sandra Edwardson a plan to establish a managed care course for all the university's health professions students.
Discussions are underway with managed care firms to attract their support.
In the meantime, with three large managed care companies already in the metro area, the nursing school and university hospital are assessing how they will figure in the larger picture. Elsewhere, nursing schools already are enlisting private assistance. As pressures mount to balance federal spending, schools are eyeing closely this year's efforts to reauthorize the Nurse Education Act, the prime source of federal monies for undergraduate and graduate nursing education. We'd have to shrink our enrollments if we didn't get that private support. All rights reserved.