The University of Texas at Tyler hosted a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday for an expansion of the David G. and Jacqueline M. Braithwaite Building, home of the university’s School of Nursing. UT System Regents’ Chair Kevin Eltife, UT Tyler President Kirk Calhoun, MD, FACP, and School of Nursing Dean Barbara Haas, PhD, RN, shared their excitement with an audience of local dignitaries, students and representatives of East Texas healthcare providers.
Lorri Allen: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Lorri Allen. Hospitals are clamoring for nurses. The good news: the university has big plans underway to meet that need. Yesterday’s storms cleared in time for leaders to break ground on an expanded, renovated building to house the School of Nursing.
[Natural sound of countdown and applause]Lorri Allen: Tyler’s own Kevin Eltife is the chair of The University of Texas Board of Regents.
Kevin Eltife: There are few professions, more noble, more vital, and more urgently needed than nursing. Nurses are our heroes of healthcare. They’re on the front line fighting for us all. They’re our advocates and our com compassionate and selfless professionals who are entrusted with life-threatening and life-saving responsibilities. I’m proud that UT Tyler has had a distinguished history of being one of the states and nation’s leaders. In both in-person and online nursing education and that the university continues to launch some of Texas’s most innovative programs, including a new one in mental health and nurse practitioner education and geriatric nurse practitioner education, while addressing a significant workforce demand for many, many more programs in nursing.
Kevin Eltife: As all of you here know, the board has made a $300 million commitment from the permanent university fund toward construction of a new medical education building here in Tyler, and we broke ground on this just three months ago. It will serve as home to UT Systems Seventh Medical School, and I can promise you this, as long as I continue on the Board of Regents, we will continue to bring as much money to East Texas as possible.
Lorri Allen: Later, Eltife spoke to reporters outside.
Kevin Eltife: It’s a great day for University of Texas, Tyler, and really for all of East Texas, a $35 million investment in the nursing program here at The University of Texas at Tyler. We already have a world-class nursing program, but this will expand the facilities and renovate the current facilities, and it’s big for UT Tyler. It’s big for healthcare, and we’re proud to be here today.
Kevin Eltife: Now you add $35 million to the nursing program expansion. It’s just one more step to continuing to improve healthcare education in northeast Texas.
Kevin Eltife: I think the medical school and all that’s going on with the healthcare professional education system in East Texas is transformational for our economy, for the students, for the families, and will be a game-changer for years to come.
Lorri Allen: UT Tyler President Kirk Calhoun is grateful to Eltife and the regents. And Calhoun is positive the updated School of Nursing will have a huge impact on the region. Give Calhoun credit. He knows this field.
Kirk Calhoun, MD: My particular academic discipline is medicine, and I’m a physician, and I was just telling our nursing faculty that no one appreciates a well-trained high quality nurse as much as a smart MD. And so I really appreciate the fact that we’re producing those well-trained, high quality nurses for this community.
Kirk Calhoun, MD: It even involves artificial intelligence, AI . And you see people, they put the caps on and the gloves on their hands, and they do procedures in virtual space. And so the laboratory facilities really need to be upgraded, expanded so that we can accept more nurses, train more nurses, and give ’em a better educational experience.
Kirk Calhoun, MD: And this is gonna have that cutting-edge technology built into the building. Something that’s difficult to do when you just try to remodel a building and put it together. Plus we need to expand the classes, right? So we just need more physical space. So that we can have a larger nursing class.
Kirk Calhoun, MD: You know, we’re doing specialty work. We’re training nurse practitioners who do just behavioral health work. We’re gonna start a a CRNA program, which are nurse anesthetists who help anesthesiologists perform anesthesia on patients in the hospital, flight nursing programs. Nurses have so many roles that they play in the healthcare system now.
Kirk Calhoun, MD: The College of Nursing is the largest college on the UT Tyler campus. It’s about 2,000 students out of the 10,000 UT Tyler students, maybe even a little bit more than that. If we can raise that number, 20, 30%, that will have a real impact on our hospitals which are, I can tell you, are really struggling to find nurses. COVID took a heavy toll on healthcare. A lot of them decided to go ahead and retire early after going through all that, and now the hospitals and doctors clinics are scrambling to try to fill those spots. And so we wanna do our job, and that is produce the young people to step up and take these roles on into the future.
Lorri Allen: The dean of the School of Nursing is Barbara Haas.
Barbara Haas, PhD: It’s critical for our growth, not even just the growth, even for our current students. If anyone could tour our current building, they would say that our students are sitting on the floor. They’re, they’re crowded into spaces. They don’t have the space they need. They have no study spaces. So this new building is very student-centered. Every decision we’ve made, we’ve put the students at the forefront of our decision. So our mission statement says that we are caring and learner-centered, and this building reflects that because we’re putting all of our efforts into learning spaces, study spaces, commons, student commons. That’s where the majority of the building what the building will be.
Barbara Haas, PhD: We have simulated babies, for example, that cry and respond and move their arms, and it’s just, it’s incredible how realistic the simulations have gotten in recent years. So this will expand our capabilities to help students prepare for real world scenarios so that they can practice. And if they make mistakes, it’s a safe place to make a mistake and learn from it before they go out and take care of patients in the community.
Lorri Allen: Haas says the new building will help recruit even more students.
Barbara Haas, PhD: It’s certainly gonna be an attraction because when students come and tour, that one place they always wanna see is our simulation center and they love it already. This new one is all absolutely gonna blow them away. It is so beautiful. It’s gonna be wonderful. So yes, I think it will be a real draw for potential students no question.
Lorri Allen: Those who hire UT Tyler nursing graduates have been asking for certain specialties.
Barbara Haas, PhD: That’s why we are planning an adult geriatric Acute Care Nurse Practitioner. And then we’ve also heard from our facilities that they need more anesthetists. So that’s why we’re planning the CRNA. And the CRNA is a very prestigious program, too. There are very few in the country, and so we’re very honored that we’ve even been allowed to pursue it. And, you know, we hope that it gets final approval. And if so, we hope to start that in 2025, as well. So, 2025 will be a huge year for nursing because we hope that we’ll have launched our Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, our CRNA, the building will be finished, and we’ll celebrate our 50th anniversary that year of the UT Tyler School of Nursing.
Lorri Allen: Donors have been generous to start the School of Medicine. Now Dr. Calhoun asks the community to consider donating to the Nursing School.
Kirk Calhoun, MD: I wanna urge people to donate to the nursing school, too. Nurses are really important. And it will help us move even more quickly to meeting the needs of our community.
Lorri Allen: Heavy earth-moving machines are already parked between the Center for Performing Arts and the Braithwaite building. The digging can’t start soon enough for students and the patients who need them. I’m Lorri Allen for UT Tyler Radio.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)
