Author: chiara-canzi

More than 1.2 million nurses will be needed in hospitals all over the country by 2014, according to the UVA School of Nursing. Yet nurses are not the only sought-after profession—their teachers, too, are in demand.

At the UVA Medical Center, nurses have been affected by the shortage, but hospital officials say it could be worse. “Right now, we don’t really have a shortage at UVA,” says Dr. Pamela Cipriano, UVA’s Health System’s chief clinical officer and chief nursing officer. “We may have some areas where we are still recruiting, but we feel very fortunate to have staffing in all of our areas.” There are currently 164 nursing vacancies in the UVA Hospital that, when filled, would join the 2,040 registered nurses and 110 licensed practical nurses already working.

The primary concern, hospital officials say, is to keep the ones they already have.

“Faculty is retiring at a rate that is now becoming significant,” says Pamela Cipriano, UVA’s Health System’s chief clinical officer and chief nursing officer.

To lure nurses, the Hospital offers what Melissa Frederick calls a “competitive benefits package.” Frederick, director of compensation and interim director of recruitment at the Hospital, says the package includes an on-site child care center, sign-on bonuses based on the nurse’s specialization and traveler nurses who are called when there is immediate need for backup.

“Some new graduates have a guaranteed raise and advancement on the job unit,” says Maria Carlton, special project manager for Dr. Cipriano. “We want to reward them for staying.”

In 2007, the UVA Hospital hired 275 nurses, and 119 were new graduates, a number that Frederick calls impressive. “We are very proud of it,” she says.

To reduce the nursing gap, the Health Resources and Services Administration estimates that nursing schools will have to increase the number of graduates about 90 percent.

Increasing graduates at UVA, however, means increasing the faculty. “If we had 10 more faculty we could increase our enrollment,” said Dory Hulse, director of communication for the School of Nursing. “Budget obviously has a decisive impact on the number of faculty we can support.” The School has launched a search committee to add three new faculty in hopes of increasing enrollment.

“The average faculty member is older than the average clinical nurse,” says Cipriano. “And faculty is retiring at a rate that is now becoming significant.”

The first problem in recruiting faculty is money. Because of the nursing shortage, clinicians earn more, says Hulse, and academia is not able to keep up. “You are not going to have more nurses if you don’t have faculty to teach them,” she says. In 2008, the salary of a nursing faculty started in the mid-$50,000s, while the starting salary of a new graduate in the field is $43,804.

The second problem is credentials. “The candidates have to have more education,” says Dr. Cipriano. “So there are a lot of nursing schools that are competing for the individual with the right credentials.”

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Claude and Annie Miller looked like kids in a candy store. Hand in hand, they strolled down Carr’s Hill Field and jumped with excitement as the drumline’s potent beat reverberated throughout Grounds.

“I’ve always loved marching bands, but they are not part of French culture,” says Claude Miller. “It’s an American thing.” He watches them on YouTube.

Marching bands, perhaps the great symbol of the American dream to young Frenchmen.

The French husband-and-wife duo is researching their next project, a documentary film that chronicles the life of a college marching band.

The backdrop of the film is not music per se, explains director Claude Miller, but rather a more personal look at the students’ involvement in this fall’s presidential elections. “Whatever happens in America in November is important for the world,” says Claude Miller. “It’s a very special moment in history and we want to ask students what they think.”

UVA’s Cavalier Marching Band is one of the two schools chosen to be featured in the film and was selected, says Claude, “because [it is] a good and serious band.”

Their affinity for Virginia was sparked by the founders and directors of Virginia Commonwealth University’s French Film Festival, Dr. Peter Kirkpatrick and Dr. Françoise Ravaux-Kirkpatrick, who invited the Millers and made Claude the honorary chair of last year’s events.

The crew plans to film UVA’s band and contrast it with Petersburg’s Virginia State University, a historically black college.

The couple got the idea of using students’ fanatic school spirit to depict a portrait of American youth and their involvement in politics about a year ago. They recognized the historical importance of these elections as they followed closely the primary season. “If Obama wins, it’s an event, a world event,” says Claude Miller.

The director, whose resumé reflects a concern for humanity’s social values, won a Cesar, France’s academy award, for Best Writing in 1982 for Garde á vue, a story about the human instinct to avenge a crime done to a child. He won the Cannes Jury Prize for La Classe de Neige—Class Trip in 1998. His most recent film is 2003’s La Petite Lili.

The director says he expects a mixed reaction from the French audience. “French youth will see [the movie] as a very exotic thing,” he says. “Maybe they’ll see it as the American dream.” He smiles thinking of when he was 20 and America inspired him to make movies. Nowadays, however, European youth are merely interested in the commercial aspect of the dream, he says. “It’s less about the dream and more about the music, rap and hip-hop.”

The Millers filmed at both schools in August and will be back at the end of October to get reactions around election night, November 4. They hope to have the film ready in time to present it to the Commission of next year’s Cannes Film Festival.

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Life just got a little better for all those critters that get tangled up in the human routine.

A lab in UVA’s Department of Biomedical Engineering has donated an ultrasound scanner to the Wildlife Center of Virginia. William Walker, head of the lab, purchased the General Electric Logiq 700 MR scanner in 1997 for $100,000, though it has since depreciated to between $5,000 to $10,000.

Walker says he would have preferred to donate the scanner for human use. But it had been modified for experiments in his lab and thus no longer met Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards.

The bald eagles of Virginia have access to improved medical care, thanks to a UVA donation to the Wildlife Center of Virginia.

“UVA can only donate to nonprofits, so many animal hospitals were out of the question,” says Walker. The Wildlife Center of Virginia, located in Waynesboro, treats injured wildlife and heavily relies on private donations for most of its operations. Since opening its doors in 1982, the Center has cared for more than 50,000 wild animals, from reptiles to native birds and mammals.

The once-state-of-the-art machine was received by the Wildlife Center with open arms. “We are so glad to have the machine,” says Dr. Elizabeth Daut. “It’s ultra-high-end quality.”

Daut says the ultrasound machine is a much needed resource this time of year. “We are going into raptor season,” she says. “We are seeing the migration of birds coming from the north and going further south.” Some of them, says Daut, will inevitably end up on the side of the road hit by incoming traffic.

The scanner will enable vets to explore and better detect legions in the birds’ bodies and avoid invasive procedures, thus saving the animal unnecessary stress.

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The 2008 presidential election has attracted a record number of new registered voters throughout the country, and the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County are part of that trend. Since 2004, more than 5,000 new voters registered in the city along with more than 5,000 in the county. But the influx of voters will strain the city’s voting resources.

The reason for that strain comes from legislative hamstringing. In an effort to ease fears of hackers manipulating electronic voting machines, the Virginia General Assembly passed a law in April 2007 that prohibits local governments from purchasing new Direct Record Electronic (DRE) voting machines. If localities need new voting machines, they are expected to turn to optical scanning machines that read paper ballots.

Sheri Iachetta, the city’s general registrar, is worried that Charlottesville will be short on voting machines come November because of a state law that keeps them from purchasing new electronic machines.

According to the Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia, the DRE machines have shown to be vulnerable to manipulation and error. For supporters of the new law, paperless machines won’t allow voters to check that their vote was correctly cast.

The city’s electronic machines do not produce a paper record of individual votes. “People didn’t have the confidence in the machines that had no paper trails,” says Sheri Iachetta, the city’s general registrar. “They want us to scrap everything and get new ones.”

But not everyone agrees that more paper is better. “We have 94 localities that use DRE machines,” says Iachetta. “And we love [the machines].”

Initially, the Assembly called for a general changeover to the optical scanners by 2010, but cost concerns and opposition from registrars, including Iachetta, reversed the proposition. Localities are allowed to use the DRE machines for the life of the apparatus—after that, they can only purchase new optical scanners.

Iachetta says the law is unfair. “In 2004, I was able to rent eight more [DRE] machines because of the large increase in voters,” she says. “But this time, we have 5,000 more voters and we are down eight machines.” The Virginia State Board of Elections and the Voter Registrars Association of Virginia intend to appeal the decision after the 2008 elections in November, according to Iachetta. “It’s a bad law,” she says.

The county, however, has enough machines for November, according to General Registrar Jack Washburne. “Before the deadline of the moratorium of April 2007, the county’s Electoral Board decided to purchase six new DRE machines,” says Washburne. “They were concerned about the increase in voter registration.” With the six new machines, purchased for about $39,000, the county has a total of 103 electronic machines in its precincts. “If the projected enormous turnout is true, we do expect to have people wait to find parking,” says Washburne. “There will inevitably be lines, but as far as voting machines, we are in good shape.”

What precincts have seen the biggest increase in registration? In the city, Carver and Jefferson Park precincts have seen a steady increase of new voters, but Recreation precinct, which includes Downtown, has grown the most since 2004.

In the county, Cale precinct increased by 704 voters since 2004. Free Bridge precinct, which includes Pantops, jumped by 607, while the Brownsville precinct, which includes Old Trail, rose by 536 voters.

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