The UCA School of Nursing partnered with Baptist Health College Little Rock School of Nursing for the first cohort of the Bridge2BSN dual enrollment program.
Susan Gatto, the director of the UCA School of Nursing, said the first cohort has six students, but they expect to have up to 25 in the next cohort.
She said, “I’ve been at UCA for 35 years, and this is my ninth year as the director of the School of Nursing, and one of the things that was very distressing to me and our faculty is that we have a very competitive admission for the pre-licensure BSN, and so every year because we have a limited capacity, we have to turn away qualified applicants.
“That always hurt my heart, because the faculty and I, we want to give everyone the opportunity to have their goals met. And because of the limitation of clinical spaces and faculty, we were turning away qualified students, which didn’t feel good, but nationwide, 30,000 qualified students are turned away from nursing school,” she said.
The Bridge2BSN program allows students to take classes at BHCLR to earn their associate of applied science in nursing while simultaneously taking UCA online courses to complete their bachelor of science in nursing.
Julie Ingram, the education counselor assigned to this track, said, “I feel that is a great opportunity for students as they are earning their AAS Nursing degree from BHCLR by taking classes on campus at BHCLR, which will then allow them to sit for the RN license once they complete their AAS degree.”
She said, “While they are completing their AAS degree at Baptist, they are simultaneously completing the additional requirements needed to earn their BSN degree through UCA online, so they actually earn two degrees once they are finished.”
Gatto said the RN to BSN program that UCA does with BHCLR inspired her to develop a similar program.
“She [Schelista Glenn, BHCLR dean of nursing] and I were talking because they weren’t filling their classes, and we had too many,” Gatto said. “So we thought, ‘Well, is there a way that we can do something that would benefit both programs?’”
“We already have a completion program called RN to BSN. So once a student leaves Baptist, they have an associate’s degree, and then they can come here and do our online RN to BSN course. But it takes them another year — it takes them 12 months to get that complete. So we thought, ‘How can we combine that with what they’re doing, and if they do it at the same time?’”
Gatto said the six students in the program’s first cohort have faced a few challenges, but both schools strive to prioritize students in the program.
Gatto said that the schools coordinated learning calendars so students have an easier time with the overlapping courses.
“We’re trying to match up the content, like when the adult II class is talking about respiratory, then we talk about respiratory assessment, and when they talk about abdominal stuff, then we do abdominal assessments,” she said. “So we’re trying really hard to make the two match so that they’re studying one thing when studying for both.”
Gatto said the School of Nursing also got a grant for an academic support coach grant.
“Two colleagues and I wrote a grant that we got funded through the state, and that’s how we got to hire an academic success coach for two years and to help our whole goal here, which is we want to graduate every student we admit,” she said.
Gatto said the School of Nursing is also “working hard to increase our retention rate of students in the BSN track.”
She said, “We have a very high retention rate — very high, a lot more than other nursing schools. So we’re really proud of that.”