New Funding: Department of Labor Nursing Expansion Grants – Deadline January 6.

  The U.S. Department of Labor will invest $80 million to expand and diversify the pipeline of qualified nursing professionals on two tracks: 1) increasing the number of nursing educators, and 2) training frontline professionals and paraprofessionals to attain postsecondary credentials needed for middle- to high-skilled nursing jobs.  The funding is meant to address a combination of forces – the pandemic, an aging workforce, and retirements – that have challenged the supply of a skilled nursing workforce, and places emphasis on training those who are underemployed and/or from underrepresented populations to improve workforce diversity. 

A recent brief from the Rural Health Research Gateway showed that, due to a relatively high proportion of registered nurses with an associate degree in rural areas, programs that bridge RN experience to Bachelor of Science in Nursing degrees are well-positioned to develop the rural nursing workforce. See Resources of the Week for a new tool with nursing data from HRSA’s Bureau of Health Workforce.