NORMAL - Illinois' shortage of nurses and nurse educators is growing, and the state's top doctor came to town Wednesday to promote the governor's plan to deal with the problem.

A database with the latest nursing supply and demand information, a streamlined nurse-licensing application, and more grants and scholarships are among strategies in the plan, Dr. Erik Whitaker, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said at Illinois State University's Mennonite College of Nursing.

Reaction was positive from the college dean, Nancy Ridenour, and later from Sharie Metcalfe, associate professor of nursing at Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington.

Whitaker said the governor is proposing $3 million to $5 million a year to 2020 to start and maintain the strategies.

"I think it will be approved," Whitaker said when asked the likelihood of the Legislature approving the money. Whitaker said he appeared before a state Senate appropriations committee on Tuesday.

"I got beat up a lot but not about anything related to nurses," he said.

Everyone agrees that something needs to be done before the nursing shortage gets worse, Whitaker said.

The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity says there is a 7 percent nursing vacancy rate statewide and the number is expected to increase, Whitaker said.

By 2020, the number of professional caregivers in Illinois, including nurses, is expected to decline by 4.2 percent, he said. Meanwhile, the aging baby boomer generation means that the number of residents needing care will increase by 31 percent.

"We have to do this," he said of the plan.

The nursing shortage has resulted in a shortage of nursing school faculty, Ridenour said. ISU turned away 100 qualified applicants last year, she said.

"This is a very important step," she said of the governor's plan.

The plan also includes

w A center for nursing within the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. The center would develop and maintain a database of nursing supply and demand information, and would bring together nursing retention and recruitment efforts that are now being done piecemeal.

The database would help with projections and determining areas of need in the state, Ridenour and Metcalfe said. Illinois can't make solid nursing projections because there is no central data bank, Ridenour said.

Other states have more recent data, Metcalfe said.

w Creating nursing education scholarships.

w Grants to nursing schools to hire faculty.

w Allowing nursing education scholarships to consider merit and not just financial need.

w Allowing student loan repayment forgiveness for nurses who choose to become nursing faculty.

"Loan forgiveness programs have been successful in the past in attracting people to health-care professions," Metcalfe said.