UAPB reviving program for RNs

School: It’s step to regain nursing

Correction: Laurence Alexander is the chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. This article incorrectly identified the school’s leader.

PINE BLUFF — Since the state Board of Nursing shut down the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff’s nursing program last year because of underachievement, the school has been working nonstop to try to restore it.

On Tuesday, UAPB officials announced that they have reached at least part of their goal.

UAPB will reactivate a program in January that allows registered nurses to receive bachelor of science in nursing degrees, which can lead to more lucrative opportunities in the medical field, said Jacquelyn McCray, interim vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at UAPB.

The program applies only to those who already hold valid registered nursing licenses and does not lead to licensure, McCray said.

“We hope that by this time next year, we can offer a full nursing program once again,” she said. “This RN-to-BSN program is a good first step. It will give those who are already nurses an opportunity to further their education and be eligible for management roles related to their careers.”

A message left for UAPB Chancellor Laurence Davis was not returned on Tuesday.

The nursing board placed the UAPB program on probation in July 2010, citing three consecutive years of less than 75 percent of graduates passing the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses — an exam required for licensure — on the first attempt.

In that year, none of the 17 nursing program seniors were allowed to graduate after they all failed a practice licensure exam required to pass a mandatory course.

At that 2010 meeting, the board threatened to close UAPB’s nursing program if at least 75 percent of its graduates couldn’t pass the licensure test for each of the next two years, a standard UAPB failed to meet. Three of 15 students passed the exam in 2011, and five of 10 students passed in 2012.

In July 2012, the board agreed to keep the UAPB program on probation, allowing it to recruit new students in 2013 if it could meet the conditions of an agreement that called for continuing education for faculty members, redevelopment of curriculum with the aid of an outside consultant, regular faculty meetings and redesign of course plans to make standards clear to students.

But UAPB failed to fulfill eight of those 21 conditions, according to the board.

Among the problems: Faculty members failed to provide adequate evidence that they had completed professional development courses, and the department chairman failed to submit faculty-development plans.

In April 2013, the nursing board closed down the program.

McCray and others at UAPB said they have made great progress over the past year in addressing the problems and putting practices in place to prevent another collapse of the program.

“We have put into place new ways of monitoring student progress, we added new equipment to improve the lab experiences of students, and we feel like we can now better identify the weaknesses and address those before chaos occurs,” McCray said.

At Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Nursing Department Chairman Barbara Landrum said she remembers similar but less serious issues when she took over the program there in 2006.

Landrum said it took nearly five years to “reset the program to where it needed to be.”

This year, 100 percent of HSU’s 17 nursing students passed their licensure tests, which Landrum said was a testament to the hard work her faculty has put into the program.

“One of the things we did to help our students succeed was to set the entry point into our program at the end of the sophomore year instead of the freshman year,” she said. “Nursing is built on a solid foundation of primary sciences, and we wanted to make sure our students understood these courses fully.”

Landrum said the HSU nursing program has also adopted a more rigorous application process, as well as standardized testing to ensure students are meeting certain benchmarks before progressing.

As for the future of UAPB’s nursing program, Annie Howell, who enters her senior year at Pine Bluff High School this fall, said she will be watching the progress with great interest. Howell plans to enter nursing after she graduates and hopes she can be a student at UAPB.

“It would be awesome to say that I went to UAPB nursing school,” Howell said. “It’s always been my dream to be a nurse and help people. I would hate to go somewhere else, but I will follow my dream. I know that they want to make sure things are good before the program comes back [to UAPB]. I feel like it will happen.”

Upcoming Events