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As of September, in partnership with Paul D. Camp Community College, Sentara Obici is the only hospital in Hampton Roads that offers paid clinical training to nursing students. It is part of the Virginia Department of Health’s new Earn to Learn Nursing Education Acceleration Program.

Paul D. Camp in Franklin, Virginia, is one of 13 schools awarded an Earn to Learn Grant, and was one of four to receive the maximum amount of $500,000. There are 19 students from Paul D. Camp in the Earn to Learn program. 

According to the VDH website, the goal of the program is to address the lasting impacts of COVID on healthcare worker shortages. The website says, “The grant was open to educational institutions or organizations that offer Virginia Board of Nursing-approved nursing education programs for pre-licensure Registered Nurses (RN) and Licensed Practical Nurses (LPN).” 

The grants are funded by Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act. A total of $5 million was put toward the grants, and the current grants will last for 18 months — September of this year through December 2025. 

Before coming to Paul D. Camp, Dean of Nursing Dr. Angela Sheaffer said she previously worked with a similar Earn to Learn program. She said they noticed an unforeseen positive outcome of decreased attrition rates among nursing students in the program.   

It’s only a few months into Paul D. Camp’s Earn to Learn program and Sheaffer said she’s already seen similar results. She’s been at Paul D. Camp since November 2022, and said this is the first semester she’s seen that everyone participating in their third semester of the nursing program will be moving on to the fourth semester. 

Obici Magnet Program Manager Kristi Morgan said they applied for the grant in the beginning of June and were awarded the grant in the beginning of September. Upon receiving the good news, Morgan said she and Sheaffer agreed to implement Earn to Learn for the remainder of the spring semester instead of waiting until the fall like all the other awarded schools.

Sheaffer said they were able to put Earn to Learn in motion so quickly because they already had a plan in place, they were just waiting for the grant to get started. She said they wanted to provide students with the benefits of the program as quickly as possible. 

“We have already seen success with these students,” Sheaffer said. “They are very motivated. They are very appreciative of the fact that they’re getting paid for some of their clinical time, and in moving forward, this kind of helps them better understand what it’s like to be a nurse.”

Angela Belch is a nursing student at Paul D. Camp and is participating in Earn to Learn at Sentara Obici. She spoke to the benefits of the program, as she is one of many nursing students who had to give up their full-time jobs in order to complete their clinicals. 

“To be in the program, to have … not only that extra hands on help with the staff here, but to have the extra funds to help pay for gas and food and those expenses … a lot of us gave up our jobs to fulfill our dreams of finishing our career,” she said. 

Registered nursing students at Paul D. Camp are required to complete 500 clinical hours to graduate. Without Earn to Learn, all of these hours were unpaid. This fall, Belch said she was set to do about 300 hours. Now, Morgan said those in the program get an hourly wage comparable to what a certified nursing assistant would make.

With the $500,000 grant, the hospital isn’t only paying the students, but also bought mannequins, gloves, IVs and other supplies so students didn’t have to supply it all themselves, which Belch said is “super helpful.”

“We wanted to kind of account for those kinds of things, to kind of help offset [the cost] … because you consider community colleges don’t probably have a very big budget, and so they’re probably limited in the things that they can get, and so we wanted to make sure that the students would have the means to really be able to learn those technical skills,” Morgan said.

For its first semester the program was only open to registered nursing students, Sheaffer said, but next semester it will also be open to practical nursing students, which is part of the reason why they were awarded the maximum grant amount.

Sheaffer said there will be 40 students total participating in the program next semester — 20 practical and 20 registered nursing students. She said equitable distribution of the grant money is very important to her, which is why she wanted to make sure it would be available to all nursing students.

Both Sheaffer and Morgan highlighted Paul D. Camp’s diverse demographics, which Morgan said could have also played a role in receiving the grant. According to its website, the school is about 50% white, 35% Black, and 14% other. 

“We kind of really spoke about that in the grant, about the students, their demographics, the demographics of the hospital here, the demographics of the people that are under served in the area,” Morgan said. “Because, you know, a lot of times there’s people out there that want to be taken care of by people that look like them, and so they wanted to make sure that there’s a diverse population out there.”

Sheaffer spoke about the importance of a small, diverse community college like Paul D. Camp getting the grant. She said because they are in a more rural area, they tend to have a lower income student body, so the Earn to Learn program is truly helping those who need it most. 

Because Earn to Learn is being funded through a state grant, it won’t last forever. Once the current grants end next December, schools will have to reapply for another one if there’s more available funds.

Sheaffer said they are trying to be very proactive and find a way to make a more permanent Earn to Learn program. 

She said the College of Albemarle in North Carolina have their own permanent Earn to Learn program that comes from foundational funding. She has plans to talk to them about their program and try to find a way to implement something similar at Paul D. Camp.

“With this being as effective as it has been, to actually not have it in place would make us go backwards, students wouldn’t be successful,” she said. “w\We’ve already started talking about it, and our hope is that the grant is extended past ’25 but if it isn’t, we’ve already started having those conversations, [we’ll] hopefully move towards a model where we do still have Earn to Learn.”