Publications

Nursing schools have reported a lack of clinical placement sites and insufficient numbers of qualified nursing faculty as two of the prominent barriers to expansion of their nursing programs. The Centralized Clinical Placement System (CCPS) and the Centralized Faculty Resource Center (CFRC) are two systems that were implemented in the San Francisco Bay Area to help address these barriers to program expansion. Researchers at the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California, San Francisco evaluated these systems and their impact on nursing student enrollments in the San Francisco Bay Area. Findings from the evaluation indicate that (1) there was an increase in the percentage of hospitals in the region that took students during non-traditional times (weekday off shifts and weekends), (2) a greater share of hospitals accepted students in high-demand clinical areas such as pediatrics and psychiatry, and (3) all clinical departments had an increase the number of weekly student hours. Analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data indicate that CCPS may have helped facilitate between 15.3% (n=218) and 20.6% (n=294) of the total increase in enrollment in nursing schools in the 5-county Bay Area since 2004.