Can a new Pierce County academy help Washington better serve its ailing veterans?

Rosemary Montalvo
·3 min read

The Washington Department of Veteran Affairs will open its first on-site Nursing Assistant Academy at the Washington Soldiers Home in Orting this month.

WDVA is experiencing a 23.5% certified nursing-assistant vacancy across the four State Veterans Homes, according to a WDVA press release. A CNAs role is to provide comfort and assistance to patients. Some of their core duties include taking vitals, helping their patient eat and bathe, according to All Nursing Schools.

The Nursing Assistant Academy is an innovative approach to recruit of CNAs and was created in response to the shortage, WDVA’s professional development manager Aschlee Heiny said.

“Over the last two or three years, during the pandemic, there’s been a need just to hire licensed clinical workforce,” WDVA director David Puente said. “We recognized that during that period of time that we needed to do something different because we were using normal recruiting processes and we just weren’t able to hire enough individuals.”

WDVA has 246 permanent CNA positions between the four Veterans Homes, with 55 of those positions vacant. WDVA has 517 beds available to accommodate veterans across the four Veterans Homes, but 116 beds were vacant as of last week, Heiny said.

David Puente, Director of Washington State Department of Veteran Affairs, acknowledges Aschlee Heiny, professional development manager at WDVA, for her work in opening the agency’s first on-site Nursing Assistant Academy during the academy’s open house on June 5, 2023. The Nursing Assistant Academy will be housed in O’Connor Hall in the Washington Soldier’s Home in Orting.

The agency is unable to open vacant beds to more veterans because it does not have enough CNAs available to provide adequate care to veterans and their families, Puente said.

WDVA will fund the academy by repurposing federal and state money that has already been allocated for agency staffing.

“What we’re doing with the Nursing Assistants Certified Academy and program is we are currently using vacant positions that are already funded from state dollars and federal reimbursement dollars that we get, so it’s already a funded position,” Puente said.

WDVA is also using state money to hire a director who will serve as an instructor for the academy.

Students in the first few cohorts of the Nursing Assistant Academy will be employed by WDVA and be state employees throughout the entirety of the course. They will receive training from the academy for free.

When asked how much the Nursing Assistant Academy would cost the agency, Puente said he could not provide a definitive dollar amount because they still do not know exactly how many students will enroll in the program. Puente said that WDVA will pay the students, which would cost the agency $3,000 per student per week.

WDVA will pay their students a little over $18 per hour while they are in the academy but will increase their pay to just under $21 once they are certified.

As state employees, the Nursing Assistant Academy students will receive a benefits package that includes health care, dental, vision and life insurance, Heiny said.

They will also be eligible to receive the 4% wage increase that will be effective July 1, according to the Governor’s Proposed 2023-25 Omnibus Operating Budget.

The academy will take place over a span of five weeks in O’Conner Hall at the Washington Soldiers Home in Orting, and students will split their 40 hour weeks evenly between in-class instruction and hands-on learning.

“We don’t want individuals to have to relocate to be able to find career training programs,” Heiny said. “The two roots of why we started the program was to ensure we have our own qualified caregivers, but also to create supported career pathways in our communities.”

The first cohort is anticipated to begin on June 20. More information about the Nursing Assistant Academy can be found on the WDVA website.