Hall has nearly 30 years of nursing and education experience and is responsible for developing new academic programs.
A certified disaster nurse, Hall is an active volunteer with the American Red Cross, caring for people affected by disasters and providing disaster nurse certification courses for other nurses.
In her time away from academics, Hall runs marathons. She received her final star in the "Six Star Medal" in February 2025, after completing all of the World Marathon Majors: Tokyo, Boston, London, New York City, Berlin and Chicago. Additionally, Hall completed the Sydney Marathon, a late addition to the major marathons list.
Tell me about the 'potential' shortage of nurses in Louisiana.
If you look at some of the health statistics, from the Health Resources and Service Administration, they are projecting that there will be a shortage of 78,000 full-time nurses in 2025. We are experiencing the shortage right now. It's very real, and I think it's even more real in Louisiana.
The Louisiana Board of Regents projects a 42 percent shortage of registered nurses by 2030 — which is about 182 nurses.
What's happening to fuel this is that a lot of our nurses are older, a lot of them are retiring. We don't have as many young people choosing nursing as a career.
Even though the schools are pumping out a lot of nursing students and a lot of new graduates, we can't really keep up with the retirements.
We see a significant number of new graduates leave the profession within the first couple of years of their degree. That just breaks my heart. I think they really saw during COVID how stressful nursing could get.
What is the new AI tool you are using? What is the origin story of its use?
At first, there was this uncertainty or panic or distrust of AI as a tool in school. However, I had been writing a textbook with Elsevier Fundamentals for students and nurses across to provide the foundation of the nursing profession or nursing best practices. We also use these textbooks at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University.
These textbooks also have an tool called Surepath AI. All of the textbooks that the students purchase can use the tool to answer questions and generate credible help. When a students asks the tool a question like: "Tell me how to best manage a patient who has hypertension," the tool will provide the students or the faculty information that you can trust that's backed.
Students can actually click into the citation if they need to read more about it, and it'll take them into the pages in the electronic book.
The AI tool also allows us as faculty to role-model with our students how to use AI in a professional way, because left to its own devices students and prospective nurses could get some real unethical or unsafe practices with AI tools.
Are there any other technology innovations that you are looking forward to implementing in order to improve nursing education?
We are looking at possible virtual simulations. Elsevier 360 provides us, not only textbooks, but a lot of other teaching tools for our students in that package. One of the things are these virtual simulations that are really cool.
When I first saw them, probably 10 or 15 years ago, they were really clunky. They were like a really bad video game, but now it's amazing. The programs have a bank of patients to choose from, and we (as faculty) can assign the students to go take care of them. Students can do a physical assessment. They can interview them — the simulation actually does voice recognition now, so the students can speak to the patient.
It's still not like taking care of a real person.
How could the shortage impact the way Louisianans practice medicine?
Nurses make up the majority of the staff in the hospital. We still have patients to take care of, and so there's kind of, they call it a patient nurse ratio, you know, we try to keep the same, you know, keep that at a safe number.
When a hospital is short-staffed, you just don't have as much time to spend with patients to get all of the necessary information. It's the stories from patients that help you figure out how to take care of them and what they need
Because we are losing so many experienced nurses to retirements, we are losing a lot of knowledge. Nursing is one of those professions that you learn a lot during school, but you're always learning on the job — always building your knowledge with each patient.
We prepare the new grads as best as we can, but we can't prepare for everything that's going to happen to them in their career.
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