VISION

All county health departments, state-operated medical facilities, and community and migrant health centers are fully staffed with nurses who provide high-quality health care services in an environment that encourages, promotes and maintains performance excellence and therefore enhancing job satisfaction and personal and professional development and fulfillment.

MISSION STATEMENT

The Nursing Student Loan Forgiveness Program will serve as a recruitment and retention tool to attract LPNs, RNs, and Nurse Practitioners to employment sites where it is traditionally difficult to recruit, employ and retain nurses.

PROGRAM HISTORY

In 1989, the Florida Legislature passed the Nursing Shortage Solution Act which created the Nursing Student Loan Forgiveness and Scholarship Programs. These programs were designed to be used as a tool to help typically underserved health facilities recruit and retain qualified nursing professionals. Also created in the act was the Nursing Student Loan Forgiveness Trust Fund, which provides the funds for the loan repayment assistance payments to participating nurses. In exchange for up to $4,000 a year in nursing education loan repayment monies, the nurses would be required to maintain full-time employment at an eligible facility in the state. The list of eligible sites includes state-operated hospitals, county health departments, community/migrant health centers and other locations that typically have difficulties attracting and/or retaining qualified staff.  

Since 1989, the Nursing Student Loan Forgiveness and Scholarship Programs have been housed in a variety of Offices and Agencies. In 2002, the programs were moved to the Office of Public Health Nursing of the Florida Department of Health, where they’ve resided since. In the three years that the program has been with the Office of Public Health Nursing, numerous steps have been taken to improve the results of the program and take them to new heights. These include rule changes that have made the program more effective, increased marketing that has made the program more visible, and improved spending plans have made for more efficient use of the allocated funds.