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Three questions with Theresa Garren-Grubbs, assistant professor in SDSU's College of Nursing

Editor's note: This article was featured in SDSU's research magazine, STATE of Discovery. 

The national trends paint a grim picture for rural health care. Across the United States, rural health care systems are facing "historic nursing shortages," and in largely rural states — like South Dakota — the shortage is severe and projected to get even worse. It's estimated that South Dakota will have roughly 1,000 nursing job openings annually through 2032. 

Ģ����Ƶ is taking critical steps to address this crisis head-on, and Theresa Garren Grubbs, an assistant professor in the College of Nursing who has direct experience with the challenges rural nurses face, is leading the change.

What challenges do rural health care systems face?

Rural health care systems face a myriad of issues. Rural populations tend to be older and sicker on average, and recruiting and retaining enough personnel to manage all the patients has long been an issue for rural hospitals. Some rural hospitals also lack the funds to compete with larger health care systems in terms of salary, and it can be difficult to attract recent graduates to rural settings if they are not already from there.

How is SDSU addressing the rural nursing shortage?

In the early 2020s, we began exploring ways to address health care workforce capacity. Initially, we received funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration. That blossomed into an academic-clinical partnership with Avera Health to provide undergraduate nursing students exposure to rural acute care settings in South Dakota.

This project (titled “PREPARE-RNs: Partnering to Address the Critical Nursing Shortage in South Dakota”) wraps up this year, and the results have been highly encouraging. Over half of the students who participated in the program took jobs in rural health care settings. I was pleasantly surprised with the program's success. Some students fall in love with rural health, but without that initial exposure, they might not have found where their passion in health care lies.

What will this new project provide students?

This year we received additional funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration to continue our partnership with Avera Health. This time, students will receive exposure to both rural acute health care settings and long-term care settings. A major focus of the rural nursing shortage has been focused on clinics and hospitals, but our state's nursing homes are also seeing workforce shortages. With an aging population here in South Dakota, our goal is to address that challenge and help our long-term care facilities.

This new project (titled “RETAIN-RNs: Partnering to Expand and Retain South Dakota's Nursing Workforce in Acute and Long-Term Care Settings”) will provide students with 80 hours of real-world experience, where they will work one-on-one with a nurse preceptor and get a realistic look as what it is like to work in a rural health care facility. This will be in addition to rural acute care experiences during the fourth and fifth semester of the nursing program.