St. Thomas announced plans in September to form a new School of Nursing in the next few years. The School of Social Work, Graduate School of Professional Psychology and School of Nursing will combine to form the College of Health.
The developing college will offer undergraduate and graduate programs to provide a place for students to become health providers and leaders.
“There’s tremendous demand from both students and employers for individuals who are trained in this area,” said Richard Plumb, St. Thomas executive vice president and provost.
The idea of the college stemmed from one of the university’s strategic planning task forces, called “Integrated and Expanded Health and Wellness Programs,” which examined St. Thomas’s lack of programs in health care and global health initiatives.
“We have some really good programs currently, but they’re distributed. They’re kind of scattered around the university,” Plumb said. “One of the recommendations, and the one that we’re pursuing from this task force, is to consolidate these programs into one new unit.”
Christopher Vye, chair of the Graduate School of Professional Psychology, and Corri Carvalho, interim dean of the School of Social Work, are currently co-chairs of the search committee for a founding dean for the College of Health and a founding director of the School of Nursing.
The search committee hopes to find a dean by the end of fall 2018 and a director by early 2019. From there, new nursing faculty will be hired to help develop the curriculum.
“This is going to be a very collaborative process,” Plumb said. “The nursing program is going to take several years to start.”
Many St. Thomas programs currently offer opportunities in health care. However, none are directly correlated with health care delivery, except for the School of Social Work and Graduate School of Professional Psychology.
“We’re looking at entering the health care delivery arena,” Vye said. “It’s a really exciting time at the university because this endeavor has the capability of collaboration with existing programs of the university.”
The Opus School of Business offers various master’s degree programs in health care. The College of Arts and Science has an array of majors and minors in the health and exercise science department. The School of Engineering also has programming that relates to health and health technology.
Along with interdisciplinary collaboration within St. Thomas, the College of Health will offer opportunities to work with external health providers.
“We’re looking to partner with various health providers on the outside, asking them to help us identify what are the skills, the knowledge base, what are the attributes that they want their employees to have and help us define that so that we can place students with these health providers,” Plumb said.
In the university’s 2020 Strategic Plan, the College of Health is proposed to embody “the principles of social justice, global engagement, engagement with local underserved communities and is interdisciplinary in its approach.”
“We’re hoping for a unique St. Thomas approach to health care education that is consistent with the mission of the institution,” Vye said. “We have a vision of training graduates of the future to be able to meet some of the needs in health care that involve underrepresented groups and underserved groups.”
Samantha HoangLong can be reached at hoan1058@stthomas.edu.