A career close to home
A university nursing program provides a small-scale model for building a workforce
Kyline Rael comes from a big Questa family with deep roots in Northern New Mexico. Now she’s found a way to follow her lifelong dream of becoming a nurse without having to go far from home.
This fall, Rael started classes at the nearby University of New Mexico-Taos Nursing Program — a two-year program that for many serves as a pipeline to a job at Holy Cross Hospital.
For students like Rael, the nursing program provides a shot at a stable career in a region where good jobs are hard to come by.
“I’m really glad to have this resource in Taos,” Rael says.
The nursing program has been touted by the university and the hospital as a model for building a workforce in a community that has long struggled with economic development. As community leaders strive to diversify northern New Mexico’s economy beyond low-paying tourism and service industry gigs, the nursing program may offer one small example of how to effectively merge education and workforce development.
But replicating the nursing pipeline won’t be easy. Training for nurses is standardized, and the demand for healthcare providers is high across the country. Translating this model to other industries could prove far more challenging.
Coordinated curriculum
The UNM-Taos Nursing Program started in the late 2000s, partly in response to a shortage of nurses at the local hospital.
“In some ways it’s just a natural relationship that’s become mutually beneficial,” says Melissa Offenhartz, now the nursing program director and Area Coordinator for Health Sciences at UNM-Taos.
The department, housed in a newly renovated facility in the center of Taos, goes to great lengths to bridge the university with the workplace.
Students in the nursing program do clinical training at Holy Cross. The equipment and mock hospital beds at the college’s new health sciences facility mimic the hospital’s setting, down to mannequins in wheelchairs with gowns stamped “Holy Cross Hospital.”
“We try to coordinate our equipment so that when students get out into the workforce, there’s not a steep learning curve,” Offenhartz says. “So when our students graduate, they’ve had a lot of experience already in the settings they’re going to be working in. It’s helpful for our students, but it means the hospital likes to hire our graduates.”
Since 2010, 58 students have started the nursing program at UNM-Taos. Thirty-eight have finished it. And 28 walked on to a job at Holy Cross Hospital in Taos.
Holy Cross employs about 90 nurses at this point, and the two-year-long university program has been able to meet turnover at the hospital.
“We’re the right size for the community in terms of demand,” Offenhartz says. “So far, it’s matched up perfectly.”
Bill Patten, CEO at Holy Cross Hospital, says the program has had multiple benefits for the hospital.
“The workforce that we develop is something that we have access to on a local level, meaning we don’t have to recruit someone from outside the community,” Patten said. “They already know what it means to live in Taos, and they’re a known quantity to us.”
Patten said the benefits of the program go beyond filling positions. By hiring locals — locals with family, friends and other ties in the community — it engenders trust between the hospital and its patients. Holy Cross has struggled in recent years to prevent Taos County residents from going elsewhere for treatment, particularly for specialty care. Staffing the hospital with capable community members goes a long way in building trust, Patten says.
But the way the program is designed, with a class graduating every other year, means Holy Cross sometimes has to recruit from outside Taos County to fill a vacancy, or hold off on hiring until a new crop of graduates finishes the program.
Stable jobs
Those who do get a job at Holy Cross enjoy a salary and job security that’s uncommon in Taos.
In Taos County, the per capita income was $22,100 in 2014, and more than 19 percent of the population lived in poverty. One in five people work in the service and tourism industry, which pays an average of $8.50 an hour.
By comparison, starting wage for a nurse at Holy Cross is $26.93 an hour. That works out to an annual gross salary of $56,000, and there’s room to advance.
The nursing program is challenging, and about a third of the students who are accepted drop out before they finish. Also, the total cost for the four-semester program is $10,800. But some graduates say it’s a worthwhile investment.
“We get paid well to take care of people in a community we love,” said Jessica Hiemenz, a nurse at Holy Cross who graduated from the UNM-Taos program in 2010. “This program gives people like me an opportunity to have a stable job, and that’s hard to find in Taos.”
While the program boasts success stories, there’s also a limit to jobs available to graduates in the immediate area. Patten says Holy Cross doesn’t expect to see the demand for nurses shift in the next five years, and Offenhartz calls the nursing program a “boutique” program that’s more focused on quality of graduates than quantity.
Offenhartz is proud to point out that every graduate passed their licensure exam on the first try, and the college is now offering a bachelor’s degree that can be completed entirely from Taos.
A ceiling on the numbers of nurses Taos can absorb also hasn’t stopped the medical sciences department from adjusting its curriculum to train students for other health-related careers.
The EMT program is being expanded to offer an associate degree. The college is also developing trainings for community health workers, and courses for medical billing and coding. They’ve had success enrolling students, including homeless men and people who have come back to school to earn a GED. Employers have shown demand for these kinds of skills, in some cases hiring students before they’ve even finished their training.
Efforts to create career pipelines in Taos County go beyond health care. The university’s culinary arts and construction technology programs have had success in placing students in local careers. The media arts program is morphing into a cohort program — similar to the nursing program — as a way to build momentum and excitement among students in a burgeoning local industry. A Commercial Drivers License program saw a surge in participation after the closure of the Questa molybdenum mine in 2014.
But Offenhartz points out that health care is unique in some ways. First, healthcare employment is less susceptible to economic ups and downs, meaning graduating nurses enjoy a more stable job market. Second, nurses must complete a clear set of requirements to be employable. They must learn specific skills and pass an exam before they can be hired. In some ways, that makes it easier for a university to create a program with clear benchmarks that translate directly to a job.
Still, Offenhartz acknowledges that creating any new program poses risks. There’s no guarantee that students will be interested, and it’s not certain that there will be jobs for those who finish.
“It’s always a little bit of a gamble,” she says. “You’re making your best guess about what programs are going to work.”
