Oak Terrace North Mankato, an Oak Terrace Senior Living community in North Mankato, MN, is formalizing its relationship with nearby South Central College on a nursing assistant lab that now bears the provider’s name.
Oak Terrace donated $200,000 to the college to cement the relationship. The funding will pay to renovate and upgrade the lab, including creating an area that simulates an apartment in an assisted living home and an area simulating a nursing home, the Mankato Free Press reports.
The situation is a win-win for both parties, according to Drew Hood, the community’s administrator.
“This relationship makes sense,” he said during an event Monday in which the lab was renamed Oak Terrace Senior Living Communities Nursing Assistant Lab. SCC’s nursing students often gain on-the-job experience at Oak Terrace while pursuing a degree, and Oak Terrace is a hiring source for many of the college’s nursing students, according to the media outlet.
SCC offers an associate of science degree in professional nursing that will prepare students to work in skilled nursing, assisted living, home care treatment service facilities, clinics and acute care facilities. Additionally, the college offers a licensed-practical-nurse-to-registered-nurse program.
Liz Thompson, SCC dean of health sciences, noted in the article that the donation will help train nursing assistants as the state continues to experience a shortage of caregivers. According to Thompson, the state expects to see an 8% increase in the need for assistant nurses and a 6% increase in the need for LPNs and RNs in the coming years.
In 2022, an analysis of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data conducted by Seniorly found that Minnesota nursing homes reported staffing shortages that were worse than anywhere else in the country. The analysis found that approximately 41% of skilled nursing facilities in the North Star state had experienced staffing shortages in 2022, up more than 18% since 2020.
A survey by the Long-Term Care Imperative, a collaboration between the state’s two largest senior living and care provider associations — Care Providers of Minnesota, the state affiliate of the American Health Care Association / National Center for Assisted Living, and LeadingAge Minnesota, the state partner of the national LeadingAge organization and Argentum — found that older adults were turned away from assisted living communities and nursing homes11,000 times in one month in late 2022 due to the state’s workforce shortage.
“Students are also looking to work for companies that are locally owned, that make a difference in the community that are willing to work with them. So I think that our relationship with South Central and with the students is going to be because we’re both organizations that are trying to do the right thing and trying to do it the right way,” Hood told local news outlet KEYC News Now.
