Wright State University’s Lake Campus in Celina and Mercer Health are teaming up to grow the region’s nursing workforce, in a partnership the university describes as collaborative, innovative, and sustainable.
Nursing is one of the Lake Campus’s largest programs, drawing students from across the Grand Lake region who want to train close to home. The partnership gives those students a clearer local pipeline from the classroom into clinical settings and, ultimately, jobs in the communities they came from.
Mercer Health, the Coldwater-based health system serving Mercer County and surrounding communities, is the region’s anchor hospital employer. Like rural hospitals across Ohio, it faces steady demand for registered nurses and a limited local pool to hire from.
The logic of the partnership is retention: students who complete their clinical training at a local hospital are far more likely to take their first nursing job there, keeping both the graduate and the health care they provide in the region.
Wright State’s nursing program is part of the university’s College of Health, Education, and Human Services, and the Lake Campus in Celina — on the shore of Grand Lake St. Marys — serves as the university’s regional campus for the lake communities.
The Lake Campus has been building its health care footprint for several years, and nursing sits at the center of that growth because it answers two needs at once: local students get an affordable path into a high-demand career without leaving the lake region, and local employers get a workforce trained in the same communities where the jobs are.
Rural Ohio hospitals have leaned increasingly on grow-your-own strategies like this one as statewide competition for nurses intensifies. Partnerships that connect a regional campus directly to the county’s main health system are designed to shorten the distance between graduation and a first nursing job — in this case, from a campus in Celina to a hospital system headquartered just down the road in Coldwater.
University and hospital leaders say the collaboration will continue to take shape around the needs of Lake Campus nursing students and Mercer Health’s workforce, with the shared goal of a sustainable local nursing pipeline for years to come.