Roane State plans center to address region’s health-care worker shortage

Before the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, a shortage of nurses and other health care workers had already plagued Tennessee. The shortage worsened as the population grew and more people had reached retirement age and required more care.

During and after the pandemic, a mass exodus of health care workers ensued as one in four health care positions turned over. Too many were overwhelmed by too many demanding patients and incidents of harassment.

Some became travel nurses and left the state for a series of higher paying jobs. Other health care workers learned they could earn higher pay at certain fast-food restaurants.

Roane State Community College, which serves 10 East Tennessee counties with its main and branch campuses, is known statewide for its health science programs for training registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapy assistants, paramedics and other emergency medical services workers.

Answering the call

One in emergency responders and other health care workers in this region are educated by RSCC, said Chris Whaley, RSCC president, in a recent talk to the League of Women Voters of Oak Ridge. “When Covenant Health, University of Tennessee Medical Center and Tennova asked us for more locally trained nurses for their hospitals, we said we don’t have anywhere now to accommodate more students physically.”

“Our health partners asked for new programs like sterile processing, but we told them we don’t have physical space for such a new program, but that’s changing.”

Because RSCC and other nursing schools have been turning away potential nursing students because of a lack of faculty, access to modern clinical training opportunities and space, Tennessee’s education, government and business leaders agreed to a solution. That solution: Raise $75 million for and build a spacious Knox Regional Health Science Education and Simulation Center.

The goals of the new center, according to a brochure handed out to the League luncheon attendees, are “to expand student access to health science education; meet critical workforce needs in East Tennessee communities, including rural counties; and elevate the quality of patient care across East Tennessee.”

Whaley said each year Roane State graduates about 350 health sciences students from credit programs and grants certificates to 5,000 health care workers in its continuing education programs. But after the new three-story, 130,000-square-foot center is built adjacent to Park West Medical Center on Sherrill Boulevard and in front of Dead Horse Lake Golf Course, 700 nurses and other health care workers will be trained annually to help meet the region’s growing medical needs.

“Our current health sciences campus building in Knox County, called the Knox County Health Science Center, has about 16,000 square feet,” Whaley said. That’s one-eighth the space of the planned facility.

“It’s located near the big campus of Jewelry Television. We are absolutely full," he said.

Whaley said a more spacious facility will allow RSCC to add to its 20 health science programs that give college credit, the newest one being diagnostic sonography, “or as I call it, the ultrasound program.” He explained that the state gave Roane State the mission of teaching health science not only at RSCC campuses in eight counties, but also in Blount County and Knox County. While RSCC runs the Knox County Health Science Center for community college students interested in health-care careers, Pellissippi State Community College provides its students from Knox and Blount counties with courses in all other areas.

The state of Tennessee has appropriated $67.5 million, and Covenant Health has gifted 10 acres of land for development of the Knox Regional Health Science Education and Simulation Center. Covenant Health manages many regional health-care facilities, including Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville and Methodist Medical Center of Oak Ridge.

To complete the financing of the $75 million project, the Roane State Foundation has initiated the “Thrive Campaign” to raise $7.5 million from private donors. The goal is to attract $5 million to build, furnish and equip the facility and $2.5 million to provide scholarship support and aid for health science students. Although many students will receive tuition assistance from Tennessee Promise scholarships, they will each need $1,500 to defray the costs of the supplies they must have, according to Scott Niermann, executive director of the Roane State Foundation.

The construction and management of the new center, which will enroll students from Knox and surrounding counties, will be led by RSCC in partnership with the Tennessee College of Applied Technology (TCAT) Knoxville. TCAT health science programs at its 24 campuses train future practical nurses, nursing aides, operating room technicians (surgical technologists), medical and dental assistants and medical office information technology workers.

Students will use computerized manikins

The center will be the first of its kind in Tennessee because it will integrate learning experiences in the classroom, labs equipped with modern technologies and hospital-like rooms hosting simulations using manikins, giving students more hands-on experiences in patient care than they might later get in their clinical training with human patients.

Victoria Battershell, director of the Knox Regional Health Science Education and Simulation Center, said the center will have computerized manikins, each costing about $160,000, that will simulate health-care scenarios. The manikins, made by Norway-based Laerdal Medical, are full-body patient simulators that mimic human anatomy and physiology and safely allow for the teaching of clinical skills in a professional healthcare setting.

“Simulations involving manikins in this center will never be a complete substitution for students getting real-world experience with patients in clinics,” she said. But, because clinical spaces are at a premium, she added, students may well learn in simulated settings how to deal with health episodes they may never encounter in clinical training.

“We will be able to simulate cardiac episodes and even a birth of a manikin baby by a manikin mother in ways that absolutely will blow your mind,” Battershell said. “Our manikins will have blinking eyes, breath sounds, heart sounds and bowel sounds. It will respond to you verbally as we have programmed it.”

Students can practice taking a manikin’s temperature and blood pressure using simulated equipment that shows the numbers. They will learn to use medical equipment in a simulation hospital that has manikins in an ICU room, two inpatient rooms and a three-bed emergency room that can be turned into a surgical suite. There will be a simulated patient bathroom, she said, to give students practice safely transferring manikin patients from the bed to the shower stall and back again.

Using manikins, Battershell said, the 11,000-square-foot Sim Center (as she calls it) will train future emergency medical technicians how to safely transfer an injured person from a car accident to a real ambulance and how to safely bring a patient down from the second floor of a residential building to the ambulance using a stretcher or chair.

“We will teach EMTs how to deliver a simulated baby in the back of an ambulance,” she added.

Battershell said that artificial intelligence will be used to simulate realistic scenes through videos made from 360-degree scans of different health-care environments.

“If we do critical care air transport training,” she said, “we want to make the room look like the back of a C-17 aircraft while our EMT (emergency medical technician) student is working on a simulated patient.”

Whaley was introduced as the leader who “understands that Roane State is a place that drives economic development by working closely with employers to offer relevant programs that meet employers’ workforce needs.” He noted that because of the industries in Clinton, RSCC emphasizes its courses on mechatronics and advanced manufacturing at its campus there. Some courses at its Oak Ridge campus are “centered around what Oak Ridge is and what it does. We offer chemical tech and mechatronics, and we’re going to have a new program on nuclear technology.”

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: RSCC plans center to address region’s health-care worker shortage