AUGUSTA – House Majority Leader John Richardson wants to ease the nursing shortage by encouraging a few working nurses to leave the bedside. While he also endorses immediate improvements to conditions for working nurses – such as mandated staffing ratios – the Brunswick Democrat says Maine needs to take a longer view of the worsening problem.

In a bill scheduled for a public hearing this afternoon, Richardson proposes that the state establish a small incentive fund – just $50,000 – to partially reimburse nurses who earn a graduate degree and commit to teaching at a Maine nursing school for a minimum of three years.

The shortage of working nurses, along with their increasing age, affects not only the immediate supply of clinical workers, but also the number of instructors available to teach the next generation. Richardson hopes his bill, LD 735, will encourage nurses to pursue graduate degrees and swell the ranks of teachers at Maine’s nursing schools.

Nursing instructors in two-year programs are required to have at least a master’s degree, while baccalaureate programs call for a Ph.D. or other doctoral preparation.

According to Terry Shipps, director of the school of nursing at the University of Maine, Richardson’s right: Qualified nursing professors are hard to come by. Shipps said an opening for a pediatric specialist in UM’s five-year program hasn’t drawn a single response for more than a year, despite national advertising.

Several possible explanations include Maine’s harsh climate and UM’s low-end pay scale. But the bottom line, Shipps said, is “there’s no one to hire.”

Shipps said there are long-standing faculty openings in just about every nursing program in Maine.

At Eastern Maine Technical College in Bangor, school of nursing director Suzanne Brunner concurred. She has been advertising for a pediatrics instructor without success. Three of her program’s six instructors are between 61 and 65 years old and will retire within a couple of years. Her youngest faculty member is 50.

Thanks to the well-publicized shortage of bedside nurses and the lucrative incentives being offered by hospitals and other facilities, applications to nursing schools are up. Brunner said she has selected 32 students for next year’s entering class at EMTC, out of more than 200 applicants. Recent classes have been smaller, closer to 24 or 25, she said.

UM’s Terry Shipps expects to have 48 students graduate this spring, but says next year’s entering class could be nearly 70 percent larger.

Countering reports that people are no longer drawn to the profession, Shipps said students still feel “called” to serve others.

“They say they want to do something meaningful with their lives,” she said. “Since 9-11, they say they want to do something heroic.” The current military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have generated new interest, too, she said.

But nursing schools are limited in their ability to respond to this new idealism, Shipps said, by issues such as lab space, clinical practice sites, and, increasingly, a lack of qualified faculty.

Richardson admitted that his bill is just one small measure to improve the situation. But in tough economic times, he said, “We’re all trying to find ways to put our finger in the dike of the nursing shortage.”