On November 11, NVU-Lyndon and Vermont Technical College hosted a joint press conference about the federal grant to support a new nursing program, featuring U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy, U.S. Congressman Peter Welch, NVU Interim President John W. Mills, VTC President Patricia Moulton, and Northern Vermont Regional Hospital CEO Shawn Tester. The $240,000 dollar grant was funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration after NVU secured additional funding from the Vermont Community Foundation and a donation from Lyndon alumni Christian Mason.
The goal of the grant is to support the nursing program at Vermont Technical College and create facilities at NVU-Lyndon that will allow nursing students to complete degrees from start to finish at NVU. Unused offices and a computer lab in the Vail Hall will be transformed into the Clinical Nursing Education Center. The new 1500 sq ft space will include instructional spaces, skills development spaces, and simulation labs that mimic clinical rotations. In the nursing skills lab, there will be hospital beds, headwall units, iv pumps, and everything in a standard hospital room for students to practice with. In the high-fidelity human patient simulation labs, there will be pediatric and adult simulators that perform patient scenarios for students to practice with. It will also have a control room for teachers to monitor and control the simulations. These three classroom spaces are being designed to expand instruction with hands-on learning.
At the event, Senators Sanders and Leahy discussed the state and federal importance of this grant and why they supported it. Leahy discussed the nursing shortage in Vermont and how critical it is to educate new nurses, saying, “3,000 nurses are projected to leave the profession within the next year.” Sanders says the nursing shortage is not currently being fulfilled by the incoming graduates and state hospitals are spending over $75 million on travel nurses because of it. “Our job, and I think we are all united in this, is to create local nurses; to attract people into the profession and to make sure they are paid a living wage,” he said. This grant hopes to create a “nursing pipeline” to fill this shortage.
Currently, NVU only offers a Pre-Nursing major in conjunction with VTC. Nursing students spend their first year at NVU before going to VTC for their second and third years in the program, graduating with an Associate of Science in Nursing (ADN) before moving on to their bachelor’s. This grant students will now allow students to finish a full four-year degree at the Lyndon campus without having to transfer, but the classes will still be offered from the Vermont Tech program. NVU President John Mills thinks more programs like this could happen after the Vermont State University merger. “This nursing pathway project and establishment of the Clinical Nursing Education Center is a true example of public-private collaborations and the opportunities that await us as we work to create the future Vermont State University,” Mills said at the press conference.
However, as the program planning gets underway, freshman nursing student Joe Santiago is confused about how the new program affects him. “The new program sounds great, but as a current student, I don’t know if this program will be accessible to me.”
The new program will enroll its first nurse practitioner students in 2022. News on how current associate’s students can transfer into new the hands-on learning program has not been released.
Feature Photo by Sean Cavanaugh || NVU Director of Marketing and Communications Sylvia Plumb speaks ahead of the panel.