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Nursing gets grant to educate more PhDs
Nursing faculty are in short supply nationally and this shortage is linked directly to the inability of schools of nursing to prepare enough entry-level and advanced-practice nurses to meet demand.
The UB School of Nursing will continue its efforts to address this chronic shortage of nursing educators with a $1.47 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) that it will use to fund a program to help maximize the capacity to educate future PhD faculty.
“Our goal is to increase the availability and diversity of future nurse faculty, especially in New York State, which includes 170 health provider shortage areas in need of nurses,” says Suzanne Dickerson, associate professor of nursing and author of the grant.
The UB nursing PhD program is one of only two such programs in the SUNY system. This limits access to nurse PhD education for many living too far from either of these universities, as well as for those who need to maintain employment while pursuing their doctoral degrees.
The new program will combine a traditional on-site and distance-learning approach to education using the Community of Inquiry Model, which will increase access to low-cost PhD education to qualified nurses. Since the UB nursing school has extensive experience delivering distance-education programs to graduate students, it is in an excellent position to expand access to its PhD program.
The focus of the program, which will begin in January 2011, will be to increase the supply of nurse PhDs and to expand the diversity among them. One of the project’s other key objectives is to increase doctoral students’ research emphasis on clinical nursing outcomes related to health disparities that often are associated with income and ethnicity.
“We’re planning for a long-term result of expanded enrollment, as well as potential nursing research that benefits underserved populations,” Dickerson says.
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