THECB Grant Helps Address Critical Nursing Shortage in Texas
AUSTIN – Sam Houston State University’s School of Nursing School and four Houston-area hospitals have developed and
The program, Shared Nursing Academic Practice Partnership Initiative (SNAPPI), tackles the statewide nursing shortage by focusing on bottlenecks, specifically a shortage of nursing faculty.
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 full-time 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
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.
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.
“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.
“Because the instructor is already part of the hospital team, there’s no disconnect. Students are stepping into a real workflow,” said Jessica Infante, a former Navy combat corpsman and SHSU graduate who enrolled in SNAPPI. “You ask more questions, you engage more, and you start anticipating instead of reacting. You stop thinking like a student and you start thinking like a nurse.”
BACKGROUND
SNAPPI funding includes a $999,500 grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board’s Nursing Innovation Program Grants for the 2025-2027 funding cycle. It launched full operations in August 2025 with seven RN educators working across its four hospital partners, St. Luke’s Health – The Woodlands Hospital, Memorial Herman, Houston Methodist, and HCA Houston Healthcare. SNAPPI trained 55 students in the 2025 fall semester.
A survey of those students found that 90 percent of respondents rated their clinical rotation as excellent, and 86 percent said they were extremely likely or very likely to return to the hospital for more clinical training or employment. A survey of the nurse educators also found