Editorial: Identify Florida's bogus nursing schools, and shut them down

• Over the past century, nurses have played a critical role in hour-by-hour health care. And it's always been back-breaking, often gut-wrenching work.

Today's nursing education is a far cry from the 1950s and 1960s, when instructors at the Orange Memorial School of Nursing would look across dozens of young women in starched white dresses and classic folded caps, wondering how many were on the threshold of a lifelong calling - and which ones would drop out in a few years to get married or start families. Even the most ambitious students knew they would be limited to supporting roles.

As the demands on the nursing profession sifted, the need for high-quality education that equips graduates to handle increased authority and autonomy becomes more pressing. Today, Florida's nursing schools offer a broad array of technical specialties, and areas of focus that include community health, new-parent education, advanced post-trauma and psychological care and many more. Certainly, the profession still has deep roots in the mission of making patients comfortable, talking them through their fears and communicating with families. Increasingly, however, nurses are team leads who often make decisions on their own - prescribing drugs or treatments and performing advanced diagnostics.

The respect, variety of opportunity and potential for advancement are attracting increasing numbers of people interested in nursing careers and that's a good thing: Florida's demand for nurses is voracious.

Yet all too often, the state of Florida and its nursing education system are failing those students - to the point where officials in other states are questioning whether students at some Florida schools should be subject to additional screening before they can be licensed outside of the Sunshine State. These are shameful questions to hear, but ones the state's leaders have failed to ask themselves.

The Sentinel's Annie Martin spent weeks scouring records, interviewing nursing-school executives and talking to state regulators; her story (which ran May 10) lays out the wide quality gap between the top-level training programs at state universities and colleges and the scanty, sometimes fraudulent credentials awarded at for-profit schools that send graduates into the workplace with almost no hands-on experience in patient care, and limited knowledge of modern medical technology..

Even worse, it describes the state's nonchalance toward problems it should be addressing with deep concern and decisive action. Martin found nurses whose poor training contributed to catastrophic events in other states - after which it was revealed that the schools they attended were seriously sub-par. Some of those nurses are still credentialed in Florida - and Martin found little evidence that the state looked into the skills and records of other graduates of those nursing-school diploma mills.

The state does have a few objective measures to go by - specifically, students' performance on the national standardized licensing exam known as the NCLEX. In 2018, Bethune-Cookman University's historic school of nursing was slapped with probation after too many of its graduates failed to pass the test on their first attempt. With careful monitoring and hard work, B-CU was able to get its nursing program back on track.

But less scrupulous institutions address that by focusing their instruction strictly on the knowledge needed to pass the test - not the skills needed for actual patient care.

The Florida officials that oversee higher education in health professions must do a better job of oversight -- starting with a defined plan to examine educational records of nursing schools whose graduates have been involved in serious episodes of malpractice. There are plenty of ideas to borrow from other states, who see far fewer problem schools. The only approach tat won't work: Continuing to ignore the problem, as if it were not a matter of life and death.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Krys Fluker, Executive Editor Roger Simmons and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. Use insight@orlandosentinel.com to contact us.

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