How to help underprepared students?

[chocoholic999]

I have taught fundamentals at a community college for 8+ years. The preparedness of incoming students is dwindling by the year...students who can't read, write, or do basic math. I don't mean they can't read well, or quickly. I mean they can't read. They can't divide an even number by two. They are baffled by everyday vocabulary (not medical/healthcare terms). 

I don't know how they passed high school, much less the nursing program's prerequisite classes. 

Since I am the fundamentals teacher, attrition happens in my class. Typically we lose 15-20% of students, sometimes as high as 25%, in the first 6 months of nursing school. This is painful to the student to have dreams crushed, and painful to me. I take no pleasure in a student failing my class, although to read through the student posts on this site, as well as course reviews written by my students, a belief persists that I am "out to get" certain students.

The reality is that I attempt to counsel struggling students, but beyond "schedule time with the nursing tutor" and "come to me with specific questions" and "take notes from both reading and lecture" I don't have a whole lot of advice to offer. I want to scream "you were robbed of a basic education by the public school system but somehow managed to get straight A's without understanding anything and I have no way of fixing that!" 

We have changed curriculum publishers to find texts at a low reading level. We take days out of nursing curriculum to teach dimensional analysis for dosage calculation (even though they should have learned that in prereq math/Chemistry). 

We are under a lot of pressure from the state to "produce" nurses to fix the nursing shortage but I can't produce nurses in 18 months when their primary and secondary education hasn't given them the raw material to even begin learning.

I'm not sure what I want from this rant, really. I'm hoping for some help for my students, some resources that have worked, or maybe just some commiseration from educators. 

[John2018]

Imagine how stressful this is for those nursing students. They are yet to practice in the field and they are already burn out.