UofU College of Nursing to expand in order to address nursing shortage
To help address the shortage of nurses in the state of Utah, the University of Utah College of Nursing will increase enrollment in its prelicensure track by 25 percent over the next year, the school has announced. College leaders say this increase addresses the rising need for registered nurses in the wake of COVID-19 and because of other factors that are reshaping the nursing profession.
“This initiative is a major undertaking and it is the right thing to do given the contemporary challenges we face,” said Dr. Michael Good, CEO of University of Utah Health. “It’s vital that we educate, train and deploy enough nurses in Utah and elsewhere in the Mountain West to provide the healthcare that residents of this region have come to expect and deserve. This new approach to nursing education will be beneficial to all. I am grateful to our nursing faculty for proactively addressing this challenge.”
To meet this commitment, UofU Health’s College of Nursing will accept an additional 36 prelicensure students each year, increasing its annual enrollment from 144 to 180 students. In the past, the College of Nursing accepted 72 students for either spring or fall semester enrollment. Now the college will accept 60 students three times a year by adding the option of summer semester enrollment.
The college will commit more than $400,000 per year to achieve this goal, Good said. Additional personnel devoted to this increase in students will include full-time faculty, adjunct faculty, a student advisor, a clinical placement coordinator and patient simulation specialists, said Marla De Jong, dean of the College of Nursing.
“It’s important that people in Utah, as well as the rest of the country, have an adequate number of nurses to meet their healthcare needs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year,” said De Jong.