History of the Office of Missouri Nursing Workforce Development (OMNWD)

OMNWD is a grant-funded office of six research team members housed at the Sinclair School of Nursing at the University of Missouri-Columbia. OMNWD was funded in 1996 as the Northeast Missouri Colleagues in Caring by a grant from the Robert W. Johnson Foundation. Since 1996, the Colleagues in Caring/OMNWD research team has secured over $1,300,000 from federal and state agencies to both study the nursing workforce in Missouri and test strategies to assist in alleviating and preventing additional shortages of nurses prepared at all levels of education.

The Northeast Missouri Colleagues in Caring, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Grant, was established in 1996 to provide Missourians with current information on the status of the Missouri nursing workforce. Consumers, executives, educators and practitioners of nursing who are knowledgeable of trends, current status, and future projections relating to nurse staffing and the public's need for nursing are now being offered a vehicle whereby they will be better informed and more enabled to prepare an appropriately educated and positioned nursing workforce for Missouri's health care future.

OMNWD has a two-fold mission. The first is to collect data on the current supply and demand for Missouri's nursing workforce. Reports are presented relating to numbers and demographics of licensed nurses and data relating to the future supply and demand. The second mission is the establishment of a shared governance framework of nursing, medical and administrative executives. It is the foundational piece for a positive health systems environment, and its critical role in creating a proactive nursing practice environment is cited by health professionals and media across the country, and is a key component of Magnet Hospitals.

Specialized university resources directly accessible and frequently utilized by this office include the Department of Health Management and Informatics, School of Medicine, with specialists in health workforce modeling and analysis, the Office of Social and Economic Data Analysis (OSEDA), which focuses on workforce development and the implications of population change, and the Geographic Resources Center (GRC) providing expertise and support on the use and implementation of GIS, digital databases and database management systems.