University of Texas Permian Basin’s School of Nursing is growing, finding success in national testing and looking for imaginative ways to help students learn during the time of COVID-19.
Donna Beuk, dean for the College of Health Sciences and Human Performance, has administrative oversight for the nursing program.
There are currently 99 students enrolled.
“… We have 40 seats per semester, so that means that we can admit 40 students into the actual nursing program each fall, each spring, so that would be 160 total. We do not run at full capacity at the moment,” Beuk said.
There are enough instructors to teach the students currently, but there is one open position that the university is conducting a national search for.
“And then as we plan to expand beginning next fall, we have a request out to the Board of Nursing to do a 25% increase in our enrollment per semester. Once we do that, then we’ll seek additional faculty loans to accommodate that. We also use part-time faculty, which is very common in nursing. A lot of people call those individuals adjuncts. We call them part-time. We use part-time faculty in the clinical settings. We use part-time faculty in the theory didactic area based on their experience and credentials,” Beuk said.
When they get approval to expand, she said they would be able to accept 50 students per semester. That would increase them to a total of 200 circulating within the nursing program itself, she added.
She noted that the College of Nursing is expanding the scope of where it recruits students.
“We’re moving all the way out into the Permian Basin,” Beuk said.
Recently, the new Director of Experiential Learning and Simulation Denise Dunne has visited Pecos, Fort Stockton, Scenic Mountain Medical Center in Big Spring and Crane.
“She’s gone out to various other outreach hospitals and has plans to go all the way into Hobbs, N.M., to their medical center. Our goal is to be able to send our students out … their senior semester and to truly … embed them into their community to do their practicum in population health, leadership and their acute care into the area so hopefully they’ll feed back into those community hospitals,” Beuk said.
From what she’s read in non-science-based literature and heard from professional organizations, COVID has prompted some people to stay away from nursing while others are drawn to it.
“… The pandemic has really impacted healthcare delivery tremendously. The pandemic has really highlighted the wear and tear on providers. Nurses are leaving the profession, retiring early. Providers, advanced practice nurses, physicians, they’re retiring. They’re leaving for multiple reasons. And so, we’re in a very critical stage of how we’re going to continue to supply the health care needs across the nation.”
There has been a nursing shortage for decades and the pandemic has added to it.
“… I was in a state meeting just a couple of weeks ago with several of the other deans and directors from professional programs across Texas and this was one of our main conversations was how are we going to move forward with this because, even though we may get the applications from very well qualified students we don’t have the clinical sites to put students into their rotations. And a lot of it’s because we don’t have the providers at the clinical sites to give it. And also we don’t have the clinical sites because people are having to reduce their bed capacity because of the nurses,” Beuk said.
One of the things UTPB is doing is a survey within the Permian Basin to see how many nurses clinical sites are using in terms of federal and traveling nurses; how many open positions they currently have; how many retirements they are anticipating in the next five years; and has their capacity been limited because of these issues.
“Because I think if we can answer those questions, then that can help us to be able to figure out what type of strategies we’re going to use to help alleviate some of those strains on the profession moving forward,” Beuk said.
“We want to be very strategic in where we’re placing our students to help the organizations’ and institutions’ clinics. Not just hospitals but clinics and just all the different health care needs, but to be very strategic so that not one specific area is left without having some type of service provided to it,” she added.
Finding instructors was another matter discussed at the state meeting Beuk attended.
“… Other areas are having that. Fortunately, we are not there right now. We have a very strong supply of our clinical part-time faculty. We have a steady faculty within our School of Nursing. Again, we do have one open position … with the anticipation that we will need two additional faculty. I think because of the reputation of UT Permian Basin and the School of Nursing that we do not have difficulty recruiting faculty. We don’t have difficulty retaining our faculty. … We have strong partnerships with our clinical partners, and when we need an additional clinical faculty, our clinical leadership helps us to find that, so we have such a good relationship with our academic clinical partners that we don’t seem to have issues that maybe others schools of nursing or colleges of nursing have,” Beuk said.
The most recent cohort graduates have been taking their NCLEX (The National Council Licensure Examination) since their graduation in spring 2021. With a 91.9 percent first-attempt pass rate, the cohort surpassed the national first-attempt pass rate average of 85.3 percent. They also surpassed the state average, which is currently 91 percent, a news release said.
Associate Dean and Professor Minerva Gonzales said she is very excited and incredibly proud of their team.
“And I’m proud of our students,” Beuk said. “… We set the bar and they knew the bar was there and they worked extremely hard to reach it. I think some of them even set the challenge themselves that they would supersede the class before them.”
Beuk said the secret to the high pass rate is multifaceted.
“… Whenever I came in 2019, we did an overview, and I say we the faculty, really took on and looked at the new essentials set out by AACN, which is our mothership of accreditation, and then we looked at AACN essentials; we looked at the Texas Board of Nursing decks and we realigned the curriculum to match those. We also looked at the student demographics that we have and what the needs were for coaching and retention. And as a faculty, we worked collaboratively with the students, fully embedded ATI resources across the curriculum. ATI is the testing assessment program that we utilize which is very common across nursing programs … With that, we saw right (away) a little over a 9% increase between last year and this year. … We saw an increase during the pandemic when 30% of programs across the state saw a decrease in their NCLEX pass rates,” Beuk said.
During the pandemic, most of the hospitals and clinics where students had their experiential learning shut down.
“… This was when we would have thought as educators that our clinical partners would have wanted to expose students to that, but because the pandemic and COVID-19 virus was so new, no one really knew what to do with healthcare students, nursing in particular. And so, where our hospitals closed units to us, we were very fortunate to have Dr. Gonzalez, as a leader in our School of Nursing because she took the lead to put our students in the community, and to address emergency management, and community services. So where our students would have typically gone to a virtual learning, they continue to have hands-on and connected to continuing their learning in that aspect; with the health department; with the city; EMS; they connected with Texas Tech medicine residency fees … They didn’t have a lapse in their experiential learning and I (attribute) a lot of the success and the increase in our pass rates to them being able to continue that experiential, hands-on learning,” Beuk said.
Gonzales said students were involved in the vaccine clinic that the city stood up several weeks ago.
“We did it for three weeks and then the city decided that they would suspend the vaccine clinic …,” Gonzales said.
Gonzales taught nurses in their first semester to graduating seniors about the chain of command, how to organize when a disaster hits and the basics of administering a shot, Beuk said.
“It’s much more than just the actual tactic of administering it. It’s the management that a baccalaureate level nurse does … I think that’s where we make such a greater impact on our … students,” she added.
Gonzales agreed.
“This particular setting, especially in a vaccine clinic like the city had, … gives them a very different perspective because you’re dealing with the elements. You’re dealing with a few unknowns. In a hospital setting, it’s a little more controlled. You’ve got all of your supplies there. You have pretty much everything you need. When you’re in a park, which is where we were, you’re really having to consider all of those external factors that you would not have to consider before,” Gonzales said.
At day’s end, the students talked about what they saw that they wouldn’t have seen in a hospital setting or within four walls.
The first day, Gonzales said, the wind was blowing hard and they had to make sure their supplies stayed clean and everything stayed sterile.
In the region, Beuk said, they don’t have the baccalaureate programs that UTPB has but the clinical facilities are unique because students get to experience a wide range of things from serving as an emergency room nurse to a medical surgical nurse to nurse that cares for geriatric patients.
Gonzales said she started her career at a community hospital in Littlefield that was licensed for 34 beds so they delivered babies and she bounced from department to department.
Beuk said this is important for the school of nursing because that learning experience goes beyond what the university could supply in the simulation center or any type of controlled clinical experience.
“We want to make sure that no matter where our graduates go to practice that they are very well rounded and that they’re able and very capable and competent to take care of the patient population, because we know that America has an aging population. We know that the patients that we see in the hospital today, whether it’s an urban, metropolitan or community hospital, are sicker than they were a decade ago, two decades ago,” Beuk said.
“… We have to prepare our graduates to the highest level of competency possible,” she added.
Gonzales said they know more about diseases now than they did three decades ago.
“It’s really interesting. A concept like sepsis, for instance, we would keep a patient in the hospital with pneumonia. That can be treated outpatient now. But what they look for though is if that patient starts to run a high fever, things that might be leading to sepsis. Those are the kinds of patients that you see … right now. … We just know so much more about the disease processes,” Gonzales said.
Beuk said there is a shortage of healthcare providers at the physician and advanced practice level.
“The baccalaureate prepared nurse in the rural and community area has to be able to have those skills at a much higher level now than what they may have had years previously. That’s another reason why we’re reaching out and expanding their learning opportunities,” Beuk said.
