Sam Houston State University’s School of Nursing School and four Houston- area hospitals have developed and are scaling up a unique and promising teaching model that could help ease the critical nursing shortage facing Texas.
The program, Shared Nursing Academic Practice Partnership Initiative (SNAPPI), tackles the statewide nursing shortage by focusing on bottlenecks, specifically a shortage of nursing faculty. The program is collaborating with nursing, hospital and academic programs across Texas, to expand its model into rural areas that have high unmet nursing needs.
Funded by a state Nursing Innovation Grant, the SNAPPI program addresses findings of a task force on healthcare workforce shortages created by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in 2024 at the direction of Governor Greg Abbott.
The task force engaged more than 70 experts in the medical field and several state agencies, including the Texas Board of Nursing. It analyzed the nursing educator gap, which contributes to a nursing shortage that is projected to reach a critical deficit of more than 56,000 fulltime registered nurses (RNs) in Texas by 2036, according to the Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies.
Experienced nurses, the taskforce learned, were not becoming nurse educators because transitioning from a clinical job to one in academia meant a loss of pay or extra workloads, or both. In addition, maintaining a nursing job while also working as a nurse educator in an academic setting presented difficult scheduling challenges.
The SNAPPI model developed by Sam Houston State University (SHSU) removes these barriers and facilitates nursing education by creating:
1) A time “buy out” in which a nursing school partners with a healthcare facility and buys 12 hours, typically one shift, of a nurse’s time for them to train nursing students at their existing workplace, at their same pay, within the bounds of their usual schedule.
2) A boot camp for prospective nurse educators that trains them in teaching practices.
3) A manageable training cohort of 6-10 students who work with the SNAPPI nurse trainer for a semester, building bonds and enhancing hands-on training.
“SNAPPI is an innovative approach that shows tremendous potential to relieve the critical nursing shortage in Texas and demonstrates the power of partnerships between academic institutions and employers to solve workforce needs,” said Higher Education Commissioner Wynn Rosser. “Its design strengthens both educational outcomes and job satisfaction among nurses, serving the collective, strategic goal of Building a Talent Strong Texas to help our students successfully meet workforce needs.”
“Our hope is, by using the SNAPPI model in which we’re effectively sharing a nurse between a clinical and academic setting, we’re able to continue to reduce this massive gap that we have in nursing faculty,” said Dr. Devon Berry, director of the SHSU School of Nursing.