The UT Tyler School of Nursing is growing, with construction beginning on expanding and renovating its building, as well as proposals for new degrees. Barbara Haas, Ph.D., RN, dean of the school, talks about the future of nursing in East Texas and nationwide.
Mike Landess: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. The formal groundbreaking for the UT Tyler School of Nursing expansion took place in early April, and now each weekday, the air is filled with diesel smoke, the sounds of earth moving equipment and the beep-beep-beep of progress. Most of us wouldn’t welcome a $35 million project going on right next door. But that’s not the case for the Dean of UT Tyler School of Nursing Barbara Haas, and she’s our guest today. Welcome.
Barbara Haas: Thank you.
Mike Landess: Now I gotta say, I would think that roar of heavy equipment, the annoying beep, beep, beep, has to be music to your ears. You’ve waited a long time for this.
Barbara Haas: It is music to our ears because we have desperately needed more space since the day we moved into the building. We literally outgrew it the day we moved in.
Mike Landess: That is just wild. So how are things going over there? What does the timeline look like?
Barbara Haas: The project has two phases, and phase one is the addition that they’re working on currently. That will be a very large, two-story structure that will house our new simulation center skills labs, and it will offer a space for student commons.
And that’s to be completed in 2024, so a little over a year from now. And then phase two will be a remodeling of the current building, and that will take another year to be completed in 2025. Just in time for the 50th anniversary.
Mike Landess: 50th anniversary. That is quite remarkable. The nursing program at UT Tyler continues to rack up accolades, including the most recent with the Registered Nurse to Bachelor of Science program being ranked first in the state. Congratulations.
Barbara Haas: Thank you. We’re very proud of our faculty. They work so hard–not to earn the accolades, but just because they’re so committed to student success.
Mike Landess: How many students did you graduate this time around? Do you have any idea what the total number was?
Barbara Haas: I believe it was about 190. And that’s across all programs.
Mike Landess: When we spoke last January, we talked about the need for nurses across the country and the challenges that they faced and keeping them. And recently there was an ugly side of the high demand for their service when nurses who did signing bonuses, as a for instance in contracts, found out that they weren’t able to handle the schedules they’ve been given, and they resign. Then, the hospitals want the bonuses back. Is that business gonna settle itself out, do you think, within the nursing industry altogether?
Barbara Haas: I think it is starting to settle out. When I’ve spoken with my counterparts who are in practice, they said that people are coming back. There’s some fewer positions that are open now, there’s a little more stability. I think the bigger concern is that we did lose so much experience during the pandemic as people took early retirements or said they just couldn’t do this anymore. So the shortage continues, and we have fewer applicants nationally to nursing than we’ve had in the past.
Mike Landess: How about here at UT Tyler? Are we seeing an increase about the same? How’s it going?
Barbara Haas: Some of our programs are seeing an increase, but others are not. And I, again, I think that reflects the national trends. Now, we are still having more applicants than we have space for at the undergraduate level, but at the graduate level, those are the working nurses who are working so much that they’ve had trouble getting back to school. So that’s where we’ve seen our largest drop.
Mike Landess: So, we are training new nurses, but are they arriving ready to work at the same rate that other nurses are leaving because of burnout? In other words, the ebb and flow–is it evening out at all?
Barbara Haas: It is evening out. We actually graduate a lot of nurses every year. The key is gonna be the retention that we spoke about briefly–keeping them in practice because we’re graduating enough. It’s whether they stay or not.
Mike Landess: Is there any kind of a metric that says someone went through the program, they began their career, and they stayed with it for 15 or 20 years, or they stayed with it for a few years and started selling medical supplies? Do you have any sense of that at all?
Barbara Haas: I don’t know that if anyone has looked at the demographics or the breakdown of who stays and who doesn’t. I think it has a lot to do with where they go to practice because if they have a good experience, they’re going to stay.
Mike Landess: With the medical school coming along, how will you interact? How will the nursing school interact with the medical school? How’s that supposed to work?
Barbara Haas: Oh, we’re very excited about the School of Medicine. There is so much opportunity for interprofessional education, research, and service across the board, and not just with medicine, but also with our School of Health Professions and our school of pharmacy.
All four of the schools are part of the health affairs side of the house for UT Tyler, along with our counterparts on the main campus like business and psychology and education. So there’s a lot of opportunities for that. They have a beautiful simulation center that is going in for the School of Medicine, and that’s going to have opportunities for students that our simulation does not, and vice versa.
We’ll have some capabilities that they may not have at the School of Medicine. So we’ll be able to share resources and do some joint activities.
Mike Landess: One of the complaints that I’m aware of is that sometimes nurses feel that docs can be dismissive of them and what they contribute with the overall patient experience. Has that changed post-pandemic?
Barbara Haas: I think it has changed with time and certainly post-pandemic. It is very obvious that nurses were the key to health care.
Mike Landess: They were the glue that held things together.
Barbara Haas: They were, they were. They always have been.
Mike Landess: That’s true.
Barbara Haas: They always have been, but not so noticeably. And I think it came to the public’s attention the role of the nurse during the pandemic. But I would say that from the time that I entered nursing, things have changed a lot. Everything is much more of a team approach. The physicians are certainly, they’re experts at what they do and highly respected, but they also in turn respect the nurses and what their preparation is, and they see that everyone brings something to the table, all for the good of the patient.
Mike Landess: In the nursing field, I know that there are any number of challenges on a day-to-day basis. There’s no question about that. Is there support for the nurses who have talked about the fact that they do feel worn down by a lot of the schedules that they have and that sort of thing? Is there a mental health aspect, a mental health component, that’s available to them for help, either through other nurses or formal programs within hospitals?
Barbara Haas: Mental health has gotten a lot of attention since the pandemic and rightfully so. Certainly our country is facing a crisis in that regard. Specifically with regard to nurses, yes. Our psychiatric mental health program, our faculty in that program and our students worked with our department of Psychology initially to offer a program for free counseling, first to educators, because they saw the need for teachers dealing with this elementary through high school, and then later expanded it to working professionals, the nurses and other people in health care industry. And there was a huge response to that. And the psychiatric mental health faculty and students in nursing have continued that program, and they do telehealth so people can call; it’s free. Now if there’s needs to be prescriptions or further referral, they don’t do that, but they can do the counseling and be a listening ear.
Mike Landess: Anything you’d like to say about the program or the future of the nursing program here at UT Tyler?
Barbara Haas: We’re very excited about our future. Not only do we have the new nursing building coming online, but we have new programs that we’re pursuing. So stay tuned. I hope we can talk in the future about the proposed CRNA program and a proposed Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program.
Mike Landess: Our guest has been Barbara Haas, dean of the UT Tyler School of Nursing. For more information about that program and to find this interview to hear again or to share, go to our website, KVUT.org. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
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