The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce Foundation have announced a five-year, $22 million initiative designed to ensure the state will have the nursing workforce it needs to meet future healthcare demands.

To increase the number of nurse faculty in the state, the New Jersey Nursing Initiative (NJNI) will award grants through the Faculty Preparation Program to schools of nursing around the state while supporting forty-six RWJF New Jersey Nursing Scholars who commit to teaching in the state for three years after they complete their studies. To date, the program has awarded five grants totaling $13.5 million to New Jersey masters- and doctoral-level nursing programs. Grants of $3 million were awarded to the doctoral-level programs at Seton Hall and Rutgers universities, while grants of $2.5 million each were awarded to M.S.N. programs at two collaboratives — one that includes William Patterson and Kean universities and Richard Stockton College and the College of New Jersey, and another that includes Fairleigh Dickinson and Monmouth universities and Bloomfield College. In addition, the School of Nursing at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey received $2.3 million.

A new report from the New Jersey Collaborating Center for Nursing at Rutgers finds that the "average" registered nurse in New Jersey is a 50-year-old woman who works more than ten hours a day; that 54.4 percent of the state's RNs are between the ages of 46 and 60; and that nearly a third of the state's nursing workforce will reach retirement age in the next decade.

Among other things, the initiative will support groups working to create innovative approaches designed to increase faculty capacity; increase sustainable funding for nursing faculty programs; build local, regional, and statewide collaborations; and lead focused policy initiatives. In addition, to help students interested in pursuing nursing locate available programs, NJNI will begin developing and piloting a centralized online application service in 2010 that will enable prospective students to complete a single application and send it to schools of nursing across the state. The project is part of a national initiative being spearheaded by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

"There is a real danger that the short-term easing of the nursing shortage caused by the recession will create the false impression that we've found a solution to the more serious nursing shortage that lies ahead," said RWJF president and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey. "We have not. Layoffs and older nurses staying in or returning to the workforce postpone, but do not fix, the problem. Unless we act now, New Jersey and the rest of this nation are heading for a nursing catastrophe that will affect us all. We ignore it at our peril."