JJ Bullock
A clerical error by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has the nursing program at Saint Francis Medical Center College facing budget cuts that could potentially reduce the number of students enrolled and staff working there.
In August CMS announced plans to recoup the funds from nursing schools at hospitals across the country after the decade-old error was discovered.
Sandie Soldwisch, president of OSF's College of Health Sciences, said it is "critical" the funding not be pulled by CMS as it could drastically impact the Peoria area.
"It will first of all affect the number of students we could accept because we have to be able to provide every student that we accept with a good education," Soldwisch said. "They have to have the equipment they need to work with. We teach our students using the equipment they will be using in the hospital."
Saint Francis would stand to lose $5.9 million cumulatively and OSF HealthCare's Saint Anthony College of Nursing in Rockford would lose $6.6 million, according to OSF spokeswoman Shelli Dankoff.
U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Peoria, has introduced legislation that would keep the funding coming to the nursing schools. LaHood called it an "easy piece of legislation to introduce."
"If you think about the pandemic and what our country and what our community has been through the past two years, really nurses have been on the front lines, they've been in the trenches," LaHood said.
The cuts also could affect Methodist College, LaHood's office said. A message was left with a school spokeswoman.
Soldwisch said approximately 78% of the graduates from the Saint Francis College of Nursing stay in the Peoria area for work. 446 students are expected to attend the program this year.
Already facing a nursing shortage, cuts to programs like OSF's and Methodist College's and 163 school nationwide could further exacerbate staffing issues for hospitals.
"It's absolutely a critical time," Soldwisch said. "Because it does affect the number of people who graduate and become nurses."
A loss of funding would not mean the college of nursing would have to cut staff, but rather a hiring freeze could happen.
"If a faculty member leaves we would have to think very carefully 'can we bring in someone to replace a person for a person,'" Soldwisch said. "Or do we have to use somebody who is already in existence and change their work."
"It also means we aren't going to be able to get faculty who are doing research, which advances a lot of the knowledge of what we teach our students," Soldwisch said.
LaHood worked on the legislation, the "Technical Reset to Advance the Instruction of Nurses Act", with U.S. Reps. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville, and Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del.
In August the CMS announced it made an internal error 10 years ago and now intends to "claw back" the "millions and million of dollars" of funding it has provided to nursing schools over that time, LaHood said.
"We don't think that's the right decision to make," LaHood said. "... OSF didn't do anything wrong; neither did the other nursing schools do anything wrong. Our legislation basically says that we're going to put a stop to that."
The legislation has bipartisan support.
