By BRENNE MEIROWITZ
While researching how to earn an online nursing PhD degree, it dawned on me that it is no longer good enough just to be a doctor or just to be a nurse, but you must be a doctor-nurse! While it might sound silly or even confusing, earning a doctorate degree in nursing is in fact quite a sought after title, especially for those working in academia. Let’s take for example, John Welton, a PhD and RN who is an associate professor at the College of Nursing, Medical University of South Carolina, who answers to the title Dr. Welton. Oddly enough, Dr. Welton started his career as an ambulance chaser, that is to say he started his own air ambulance business in the late 1980s while completing his Master of Science degree in nursing administration from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Within ten years, the industrious Welton earned his doctorate, and in so doing developed a passion for nursing informatics. While attending graduate school, he held a hospital position in the critical care units, in which he developed and maintained databases for quality and clinical management. Dr. Welton began nursing his professional passions after earning his Bachelor’s Degree in 1980, when he embarked in the field of critical care and flight nursing until 1993. Needless to say, there is no wonder why he has an increasing passion for the economic value of nursing – especially if he is being paid a salary to research it! Surely, the costs associated with offering an online nursing PhD degree is much more cost effective than traditional classroom teaching.
Welton states that his passion grew out of studies based on registered nursing practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when nurses worked as independent contractors, rather than being affiliated with a hospital or clinic. He states that he is strongly influenced by case studies involving Florence Nightingale’s research describing differences in patient mortality in London hospitals along with ways in which to link quality and safety with nursing costs. Accordingly, Welton speaks of establishing a price for nursing care, although he names no dollar amount, as well as a way to measure both the clinical and economic contribution of nurses to patient care on an individual basis – similar to the way (in theory) physicians get paid. He basis this on the fact that with most health systems, nursing costs are budgeted into the overall cost of patient care, which includes other expenses such as supplies – all of which are calculated into the hospital operating budget. Rather than continue on this path, he recommends that hospitals return to the old way of billing for the actual nursing care delivered to each patient, per nurse. He fancies that it would be a sounder economic business model to pay nurses according to their time and costs per patient, including pay adjustments for patients who require acute care, rather than spreading out the minimal number of staff amongst the maximum number of patients.
If all that seems like a lot to accomplish in a lifetime, earning an online nursing PhD degree is not. We welcome your comments as well as articles for possible inclusion in our site.
