Nursing Admits Its First 100-Seat Class After a Two-Year Expansion

One hundred students began the clinical sequence of the Bachelor of Science in Nursing this week, the first class admitted under an expansion that raises the program’s fall cohort from 72 seats to 100. It is the largest nursing class in the university’s history, and it was chosen from 412 qualified applicants.

The expansion took two years to arrange, and almost none of that time was spent on classrooms. The limiting factor in nursing education is clinical placements: every student needs supervised hours on real hospital units, and every hospital unit can take only so many students at once. The College of Health Sciences added two partners this year, a critical-access hospital in Cedar Bluff and a long-term-care campus north of Lake City, bringing the rotation network to five sites. Details on how students are matched are on the clinical placements page.

The college also hired four clinical instructors, three of them Porter nursing graduates with at least eight years of bedside experience, and paid for them largely with a three-year state health-workforce grant of $1.36 million.

“Every hospital administrator in the region tells me the same thing: they will hire everyone we graduate. The question was never demand. It was whether we could find enough places for students to learn safely. This year we found twenty-eight more.”

— Dr. Laura Vance, Dean of the College of Health Sciences

What changes for students:

• Skills-lab sessions in the nursing skills lab now run in four sections instead of three, including an evening section on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• Clinical groups stay at eight students per instructor; the ratio did not change.
• First-semester students rotate through two sites instead of one, so some will drive to Lake City. The college reimburses mileage for rotations more than 30 miles from campus.

The space the program uses for simulation is also at capacity. The college is raising money for a full-floor simulation hospital in the Health Sciences Center and expects to say more about it this year.

Applications for next fall’s cohort open December 1. Prerequisites, the points-based selection process and deadlines are on the nursing admission page.

Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu