UNM College of Nursing: Donors - Funding Priorities

The UNM College of Nursing is committed to providing undergraduate and graduate professional education, expanding nursing knowledge, engaging in important research and bringing service to the community. To qualify more nurses for tomorrow, faculty consistently reach beyond the customary classroom to present stimulating, unique learning environments. The development program will enable the college to continue meeting and exceeding expectations in the education of future nursing professionals.

Nursing Legacy Fund
Goal: $300,000
Description: In the ever-changing, demanding, and complex world of nursing education, it is truly critical to have the unrestricted resources with which to support the greatest need areas of students, faculty, and academic programs at any given time. A dynamic college environment requires the flexibility to respond to initiatives and opportunities that are the product of both planned and spontaneous situations. It can make the difference in recruiting the best students, retaining top faculty, sustaining important community programs, developing innovating teaching models, conducting research, and acquiring state-of-the-art equipment.

College of Nursing Endowed Faculty Positions
Goal: $4,500,000
Description: According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) report on 2005 Enrollment and Graduation in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing, US nursing schools turned away 32,000 qualified applicants to entry-level baccalaureate nursing programs due to five distinct factors:

Unfilled faculty positions, resignations, projected retirements, and the shortage of students being prepared for the faculty role pose a threat to the nursing education workforce over the next five years. At UNM, we had to turn away 256 qualified applicants to our BSN programs for the fall of 2004 for all the same reasons.

The College of Nursing seeks an endowed chair in Nursing Health Policy as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at UNM. It will assist in attracting and retaining the senior faculty member recruited for that position. The presence of an endowed chair in nursing for health policy research will greatly enhance the attractiveness of UNM to experienced nurse experts in health policy. The overarching goal is to graduate nurses with doctoral preparation who, through their research, advocacy, and positions, will become leaders in health policy at the local, state, and national levels.

The second endowed chair would be in Nursing Research, Practice, and Education. The holder of the chair would also serve as the director of the Rosenblum-Weiss Center for Nursing Excellence in Women’s and Children’s Health. A focus on outcomes of evidenced-based care for this population is a common theme for the UNM Health Sciences Center.

The College also seeks to increase the established endowment for the Carter-Fleck Professorship. When it was created, the endowed professorship minimum was $250,000. The endowment has now grown to over $500,000. The next step is to achieve the million dollar level. The purpose of the Carter-Fleck Professorship is to invite visiting professors to the College, broadening the scope of offerings in areas where it is not feasible to have permanent faculty. The professorship is named after the founders of the College of Nursing, Mary Jane Carter and Marion Fleck.

The endowed chairs bring prestige to its holders and strengthen the reputation of the College, enhancing the value of the degrees conferred and increasing important research grants and awards.

College of Nursing Endowed & Outright Student Support
Goal: $1,100,000
Description: Graduate programs are too often out of reach for students with limited support. Graduate students are also prospects for faculty positions in nursing. The accelerated degree students don’t usually qualify for the traditional financial aid or scholarship opportunities even though they are undergraduates. Their academic course of study is a fast-paced 15 months as opposed to the normal 24 months, and the students in this program cannot work part time while they go to school. If the College is to continue to attract bright and promising students and mentor future nursing teachers, support for these individuals is vital to their success.

College of Nursing Programmatic Support
Goal: $350,000
Description: The College of Nursing is committed to distance education. To stay current with technology, computer replacement every three years and the extensive list of nursing courses on the Web necessitates a dedicated staff member to monitor and manage the offerings. The RN to BSN program, three MSN concentrations, and the PhD program are all available online. This makes the College of Nursing the leader in academic units offering online courses and entire programs on the Web at UNM. As Web delivery of courses becomes more sophisticated (with encoding of video and addition of audio or Web cams), additional Web support will be needed to continue delivering quality programs. Some of these initiatives also have the potential to develop into unique inter-professional teaching strategies.

The College and UNMH have designed a Master Teacher/Master Clinician joint appointment, clinical adjunct faculty model to allow for the expansion of student enrollments. The program began with four clinical instructors and now has eight volunteer and two permanent faculty. The model has now spread to other agencies in the city, but not with in-kind support. Ongoing funding is needed to maintain these partnerships and allow for expansion of capacity for clinical placements needed for student learning.

College of Nursing Capital Projects
Goal: $500,000
Description: As clinical resources for student education are increasingly stretched to meet the needs of additional students, it will be necessary to use simulation settings for student learning and outcomes assessment testing along with actual patient environments.

Funds are essential to support these environments for simulation equipment and the personnel able to operate and maintain the equipment. The College of Nursing has been moving in the direction of securing equipment and computers to operate such simulation learning systems. Additional funds will be an ongoing need. The new education building on the Health Sciences Center campus will accommodate these kinds of learning environments and will see increasing use for student learning in the future.

Bioinformatics is another common theme for the Health Sciences Center. With the advent of electronic patient care records, telehealth opportunities and the ethics and patient confidentiality issues surrounding some of these concerns, inter-professional attention needs to be committed to this area of education. Money could be used to buy software for a virtual and/or simulated patient care environment to address some of this need.

Investing in people, whether it is student or faculty driven, will reap rewards for our entire community. Ensuring that qualified people answer our nation’s call for more nurses and that we are able to recruit and retain the best faculty for our classrooms are among our main concerns.

Nursing education at UNM encompasses community service, research, and leadership. The College now has the only PhD in Nursing program in the state. We are ranked in the top 20% of graduate programs nationwide, and we hold the number 15 ranking with our Nurse Practitioner program and the number 3 ranking with our Nurse Midwifery program. These important facts are reinforced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report that Registered Nursing is the occupation with the largest job growth since 2002. In fact, federal projections indicate that by 2020, the U.S. nursing shortage will grow to more than 800,000 registered nurses. It is imperative that nursing education continues as a strong, viable resource for all of us long into the future.


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