How BAYADA Founder Mark Baiada Is Taking on the Nursing Shortage — One Graduate at a Time
Episode 20 of the Edison Sound Stage Podcast
A conversation about nursing, legacy and the bold partnership solving one of healthcare's most urgent problems.
In 1975, Mark Baiada started a small home healthcare agency with a simple idea: show up for people in their homes with skill and compassion.
Fifty years later, BAYADA Home Healthcare operates across the country. Mark converted the company — valued at several billion dollars — into a nonprofit. Not because he had to. Because the values on which he'd built the company demanded it.
And now, he's turned his attention to something he believes matters even more: training the next generation of nurses.
In honor of Nurses Week, Edison Sound Stage is proud to share this conversation with Mark Baiada — a man who has spent five decades proving that when you put patients first, everything else follows. Mark sits down with host Jackie Morlock-Miller to talk about the nursing shortage, the bold new partnership he and his wife Ann cofounded with Thomas Edison State University and Cooper University Healthcare and what it really means to build something that lasts.
Listen to Episode 20
Available on: Apple Podcasts | Podbean | YouTube | Spotify | iHeart
Episode Length: 39 minutes | Perfect for: Your commute or lunch break
What You'll Discover in This Episode
A Crisis Playing Out in Real Time
The United States is short roughly 150,000 nurses. Mark Baiada has been watching that number grow for five decades.
"There probably was a mom last night that stayed up with her child because there wasn't a nurse available," he says quietly in the episode. "That breaks my heart."
From his vantage point on the front lines of home healthcare — where care is delivered one-on-one, and a no-show isn't just an inconvenience but a crisis — Mark has watched the shortage compound itself in a way that's hard to reverse. Nurses burn out. They leave. The remaining nurses carry more. They burn out, too.
The pandemic accelerated everything.
But Mark Baiada isn't someone who watches a problem and waits for someone else to fix it. To hear what he decided to do about it, listen to the full episode of Edison Sound Stage.
Why Nursing Education — and Why Now
When Mark stepped back from the CEO role and moved into the chairman's seat at BAYADA, he started asking himself a different kind of question: How can I make a difference?
His answer surprised even him.
"Education is the most noble profession," he says in the episode. "You're really training people for the future."
Together with his brother Mel Baiada and nursing education pioneer Gloria Donnelly — who helped launch one of the country's first accelerated nursing programs — Mark began sketching out a model. Not just any accelerated BSN program. Something different. Something that would address the clinical training gap that most nursing schools have quietly accepted as normal.
The insight at the heart of it is worth hearing in Mark's own words. Listen to learn what he and Ann saw that others had missed — and how they built a program around it.
One Hospital. One-on-One. Floor Ready.
Mark Baiada had a specific vision for what the BAYADA Scholars Track could be: a clinical training experience so immersive, so intentional, and so deeply connected to a single health system that graduates would be ready to work the floor from day one.
The result is a model built entirely around Cooper University Healthcare — a Level I trauma center where every clinical rotation happens, every instructor specializes in the area they're supervising, and every student is known, welcomed, and integrated into the floors they'll eventually call their own.
"When my wife graduated from Abington, she could work right on the floor," Mark explains.
The Scholars Track is designed to produce nurses with the competence and the confidence to hit the ground running. To hear how that model came together, and what the first graduating cohort is already saying about it, listen to the full episode.
A Job Offer Before You Graduate
One of the most remarkable details of the BAYADA Scholars Track isn't the curriculum or the clinical hours — it's what happens before graduation.
Students in the program receive a conditional job offer from Cooper University Healthcare before they even cross the stage. Of the first cohort of five graduates, three went directly to Cooper.
The second cohort? Eight out of ten are expected to join Cooper.
What does Cooper get out of it? Nurses who already know the floors, the culture and the expectations so well that Cooper believes it can shave two months off its standard onboarding process.
The story of how this three-way partnership between BAYADA Education, TESU and Cooper came together — including the Rotary Christmas party where it started — is one of the highlights of the episode. Don't miss it.
The Document That Drives Everything
Long before BAYADA Education existed, before the nonprofit conversion, before the Scholars Track, there was a document.
The BAYADA Way — launched in 2005 after years of focus groups, overnight retreats and conversations with nurses, clients, families and staff — is the value system that sits at the top of BAYADA's organizational chart. Above leadership. Above the CEO. Above Mark himself.
It centers on three values: compassion, excellence and reliability. But in the episode, Mark shares something that took him by surprise when he went back out into the field to listen to his own people about it.
"It turns out to be more than a set of rules," he reflects. "It was a spirit of people coming together to help others."
To hear the full story of how the BAYADA Way was built — and why it led directly to Mark giving away a multibillion-dollar company — watch the episode.
What He'd Tell Anyone Considering Nursing
If you've ever thought about a career in nursing — or know someone who has — Mark Baiada has something to say to you directly.
He talks in the episode about the flexibility, the earning potential, the opportunities to advance. But the heart of his answer is something simpler.
"If you have a need to help and be a caring person, nursing is a wonderful career," he says.
He also shares something he's noticed about young nurses entering the field today — a small but important observation that cuts to the heart of what great nursing really requires. It's one of those moments in the conversation that lands quietly and stays with you.
You'll want to hear it for yourself. Listen to the full episode of Edison Sound Stage wherever you get your podcasts.
Don't Miss This Conversation
This is a conversation about healthcare, yes. But it's also about what it means to build something that lasts — an organization, a partnership, a culture — and to ask yourself honestly whether you're living up to what you say you believe.
Mark Baiada has spent 50 years trying to answer that question. The result is one of the most compelling conversations we've had on Edison Sound Stage.
Listen or watch the episode with Mark Baiada on Edison Sound Stage below.
Explore TESU's Accelerated BSN program at tesu.edu/nursing. Learn more about the BAYADA Scholars Track at bayadaducation.org.
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