North Notes
Spokane-North Rotary Club
February 27, 2023
Calendar:
March 6: Special field trip. Meet at noon at the main entry at the updated Downtown Library. No lunch provided.
Holmes Heroes event reply
After club members Ron Noble and Colin Prestesater represented at the Friday, Feb. 10, at Holmes Elementary School’s “Holmes Golden Heroes” the following note was received:
Dear Rotary-North:
Thank you for your ongoing support to Holmes Elementary. With your help we are able to provide much needed supplies, items, etc., to our students.
Looking forward to the end of the year Awards Assembly for our Golden Heroes!
With much thanks,
Homes Elementary
On Feb. 10, some 35 Holmes student honorees each received a certificate, plaque and T-shirt.
Happy Bucks:
John Mailliard brought wife, Catherine, to lunch to honor her after Wilson Elementary School honored her as Volunteer of the Year for her outstanding work in crafts and other help with kindergarten students at the school.
Announcements:
President Melinda Keberle said the club social for March 31 will be a retirement gathering honoring Brian Hipperson, who had joined the club in 1979.
Brian’s dad, Roy H. Hipperson, was club president in 1968-69 and Brian served as president in 1990-91. In recent years Brian had chaired the club’s Saling Scholarship program.
Melinda also said the board approved a $1,000 donation from our international fund to the ShelterBox program for housing and supplies to victims of the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. That amount includes emergency tents, thermal blankets and aid items such as winter coats.
She said the board also approved a $700 donation to the Joshua1:Nine program in Fondo Negro, in the Domincan Republic for student and adult literacy. Kristin Thompson, a South Rotary member, discusses Fondo Negro at the Feb. 6 luncheon.
Nursing number shortages a concern
Though not quite yet at a life-support level, the shortage of nurses and nursing faculty, locally, statewide and nationally, has raised alarms.
At the club’s Feb. 27 luncheon, Trena Redman, a nursing lecturer at Gonzaga University, showed the complicated issues of recruiting, training and retaining nurses. Trena is a registered nurse since 2001 and a nurse educator since 2013. She has a bachelor’s degree from WSU and master of nursing from UW. Trena has worked in emergency departments around the country and taught nursing students at Shoreline Community College before teaching at GU in 2018.
In her talk, “Nursing Shortages and Solutions,” Redman cited issues about pay, clinical placements, an aging population, retirement and burnout, and lack of nursing faculty.
“With the aging Baby Boomers, we need more nurses,” Redman said. She said pay for nurses often is more than nursing educators, which limits the number of teachers.
“At Gonzaga, we’re full (of nursing students) every year, and we can’t get (enough) faculty.
“Providence is adding 12 percent increases for nursing and Deaconess is offering a 45 percent bonus for nurses over three-years,” Redman added
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In Washington State, she said, there are 6,867 qualified nurse candidates, but only 3,484 were admitted. Some 45 percent lack clinical placements, she said.
About burnout, she detailed American Nurses Foundation data from 2019 to 2022 showing how many nurses – especially older nurses -- who left jobs during and after Covid challenges. She added that burnout in the nursing ranks also was a seriously factor before Covid.
Also, some 60 percent of nurses responding to a survey said they have experienced violence at the job, including 55 percent of those incidents involving patients and 42 percent from other nurses.
“Half or more of the nurses are thinking about leaving,” she said the data showed.
One positive trend in nursing training, she said, is wider use of mannequins which provide nurse students with real-life-like training models to deal with health issues.
Another tool is “robots” used in hospitals such as MultiCare in Spokane to deliver supplies from storage to the patients’ rooms.
“But I don’t like to call them ‘nurse robots,’” Redman said. “That’s a little offensive. I call them ‘errand-boy robots.’”
Bulletin editors: Chuck Rehberg and Sandy Fink