OTTUMWA — Health and state officials are in crisis mode.

They say Iowa could be short nearly one-third of the current number of nursing professionals in the next few years. And not doing something now to replace those nurses will almost guarantee that health care in the state will suffer.

That’s the message from Lt. Gov. Patty Judge and others following the release of a recent report by the Iowa Nursing Task Force.

“I think there are several issues that have kind of come together at the same time,” Judge said in an interview with the Courier. “The first of all the driving factors is that nurses’ wages are too low. People looking at career opportunities see that the wages are low and may make other decisions.

“People that take time to complete the program and see the wages sometimes go on to do something else where they can make more money. Part of the low wages is because the [Medicare/Medicaid] federal reimbursement rates are so low in Iowa. Ours is the lowest, in fact,” Judge said.

And the reason Iowa ranks last in the reimbursement rates is because the state is efficient.

“We do not get as much money because we have done better at administering federal [nursing] programs,” Judge said. “We have asked repeatedly for increased funding. The federal delegation needs to stay on top of this.”

But it isn’t just wages and reimbursement costs.

“One third of nurses we have now [in Iowa] are going to retire within the next decade and we are not educating enough [students] to replace that,” Judge added.

Ann Aulwes, dean of health occupations at Indian Hills Community College in Ottumwa, said they are working on that part of problem.

In fact, in recent years, IHCC has seen a large jump in the number of nursing graduates.

From 2001-02, 1,370 students graduated from the school as registered nurses. That number jumped to 2,255 students during 2006-07 school year. LPN graduates during that same time period went from 1,058 to 1,637 students.

“There were a couple of years where students who were graduating from high school were encouraged to go into other fields,” Aulwes said. “That really hurt the health care industry.”

“Nursing programs are not as large or robust as they should be because we are not able to find the instructors. Nursing is not one of the areas that can be confined to textbooks. We need clinical instructors as well. There is a good hospital and education system in Ottumwa, but we are not retaining as many students in Iowa after graduation,” Judge said.

Ironically, many IHCC nursing students are not from Iowa and when they graduate, they go back to their home states.