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Two nurses train at Seminole Community College in part of the nursing program’s new four-story training center.

Jennie Long is part of a growing number of middle-age adults who have returned to college to earn a nursing degree. The 52-year-old from Winter Park worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant at long-term care facilities for the past 25 years before being lured back to school by the incentives of higher pay as a registered nurse. “We’re part of the baby boomers,” Long said. “We’re defining our lives more than any other generation. I would advise anyone to do it. It’s been very exciting to me.” The road to becoming an RN hasn’t been easy. Long postponed her ambitions while the rigors of being a single mother raising four kids were the top priority. A decade ago, she started courses to become an RN only to get hit by a car making it impossible to complete her course work. This time around, Long has taken the plunge to the tune of a $30,000 student loan. She received some relief from those looming payments recently when she won a $1,000 scholarship from the Houghton Mifflin Student Success Award for an essay she wrote about being a nurse. She’ll also receive an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii. Long is one of 400 RN students at Seminole Community College in a class that comprises the school’s highest year of enrollment thanks to a new four-story training center on Altamonte Springs campus that opened in January. This fall the school is expected to triple in enrollment from three years ago when 80 first-year students entered the nursing program. The college received donations from three area-hospitals — Central Florida Regional Hospital, Florida Hospital Altamonte and Orlando Regional South Seminole — for a total of $750,000. Together with state matching funds, the school received $1.4 million to hire more teachers and supply cutting-edge equipment. In addition, the $33 million new campus received $500,000 from the Lee Moore family, a longtime benefactor. The training center includes a home health setting complete with a mock-apartment, the only such model in the country, said Jay Davis, SCC spokesman. Cheryl Cicotti, director of nursing at SCC, said that older students return to nursing school because of increased opportunities due to shortages in the field. “We see students right out of high school and those who are returning who have been mothers or stay at home people,” Cicotti said. “It’s wonderful. We love the diversity in our students.” Cicotti said the nursing shortage, in her view, has arisen because of compounding issues. For one thing, people are living longer in general. For another, more nurses are retiring. In addition, nurses — who are more often women — are led away from the job’s long-hours to raise children. In Florida, the demand for nurses is expected to grow by nearly 25 percent through 2014. In other words, 36,428 new jobs for RNs will be available over the next seven years, according to the Florida Center for Nursing. More than 60 percent of hospitals in Central Florida expect demand for adult critical care RNs will increase, according to a May 2007 survey by the Partners for a Healthy Community. Cicotti said that local area hospitals are having trouble filling positions. The shortage, she said, is not due to poor working conditions. “Local hospitals have realized that it’s not only how many people we can produce, but how happy their staff is that they have,” she said. “I really see hospital administration striving to make sure their nurses are happy.” This is a different reality than one shared by Betsy Marville, executive vice president of the nurses division at SEIU Healthcare of Florida. “We have a shortage of nurses that are willing to work in hospitals,” Marville said. According to Marville, there are enough licensed nurses in Florida that if 10 percent went to the bedside, sufficient nursing positions at the state’s hospitals would be filled. “To save money, a lot of hospitals nationally decided the way to cut costs is to cut nurses,” Marville said. That’s apparently what happened at Naples Community Hospital where nurses are attempting to form a union. June 2008

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