UW Bothell Nursing Celebrates 20 Years

By Stacey Schultz

The nursing program at the University of Washington Bothell celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall, an occasion marked by changes that reflect its ongoing evolution while remaining grounded in its founding mission.

These are exciting times for the nursing program at UW Bothell. The program celebrates its 20th anniversary as the department welcomes a new chair, David Allen, Ph.D., formerly head of the gender, women, and sexuality studies department at the University of Washington Seattle. In addition, there is the offering of a new degree and a new name: the Nursing and Health Studies Program. The change in name reflects the expansion of the program’s mission to include a focus on global and public health.

Previously a venue for licensed nurses to earn baccalaureate and master’s degrees, in 2013 the program will introduce a bachelor’s degree in health studies. The degree program will prepare students for career options in public and global health services; community organization; mental health and substance use services; and health education and communication.

Students in the health studies program will benefit from faculty who teach public health and global health from a variety of perspectives. “We have people with Ph.D’s in nursing, in public health, and in anthropology that can help students think through contemporary issues in health on a global scale.”

Twenty years ago, the fledgling university’s nursing program had more modest goals. “When the nursing program started it offered only a twoyear degree for students who already had a community college degree,” Allen says. Now UW Bothell is among the few schools in the nation to exclusively offer a registered nurse baccalaureate (RNB) that allows nurses to earn their bachelor of science degree in one or two years. Currently UW Bothell graduates more RNB students annually than any other institution in the state.

Carol Leppa, who was among the founding faculty in 1992, says the program was designed to expand on the clinical training that nurses receive while earning their associate degree in nursing (ADN). UW Bothell nursing students take courses in community health, leadership, ethics and research practices. “It’s not focused on how to be clinically competent in terms of giving shots and those kinds of things,” she says. “It’s much more about what the healthcare system is like: How do you deal with issues in healthcare? How do you become a leader in your unit? What’s the kind of theory that would help you do those kinds of things? And how do you deal with ethical issues in the workplace?”

Ten years after starting the RNB program, UW Bothell began offering a master’s degree in nursing. “That moved us into greater collaboration with leaders in nursing education and practice,” she says. “Many of our alums are in strong leadership positions in area hospitals and they are faculty in the ADN programs in our area. A great number of those students came through our RNB program and then to the master’s and now are out being really effective in nursing education and practice.”

Pat Olsen, a registered nurse at EvergreenHealth in Kirkland, is a graduate of the RNB and the master’s program at UW Bothell. “I knew I wanted to be a teacher when I graduated from Shoreline Community College in 1993 and I knew that I needed a master’s degree to do that,” she says. After she earned her master’s, Olsen taught for seven years at Shoreline. “The master’s degree really prepared me to begin to make decisions about whom and what I want to be and where I want to go,” she says.

Olsen recently decided to return to the clinical setting. She says she appreciates the flexibility she has in her career because of her advanced degree. “It opens up the world to greater opportunities,” she says. “I’m much more versatile in my ability to find positions and a place. I have more options.”

For other students, the program has offered a needed a mid-career boost. Deborah Kelly, administrative director for clinical education at Virginia Mason Medical Center, initially earned her nursing degree from UW Seattle in 1975. She came back to school 27 years later. One concern had been her desire to work and attend school simultaneously. “The generalist master’s degree that UW Bothell put together really fit my needs,” she says. “I had traveled as far as I could on my [bachelor of science] degree and I knew with the advancing knowledge and technology in nursing that I needed to be better prepared for the future.”

Kelly says one of the most important skills she gained from the master’s program was learning how to think about nursing from a more global perspective. She explains: “Rather than just focusing on what you are doing in the moment, it’s important to consider what happens before that moment; what are the upstream and downstream effects? It is being able to step back and look across a system or across a problem to see the ripple effect. What do you need to anticipate? Who do you need to involve in the discussion?

Allen agrees that this kind of systems thinking is one of the benefits that nurses gain from continuing their education at UW Bothell. “The policy and fiscal environment in which health care is delivered in the United States has been changing dramatically and our faculty has focused on preparing nurses to be leaders in that environment. One of the things that happens in a place like this is that the student’s scope widens and they get a broader view of what’s going on. That enables them to be more successful when they’re working, even if they go back to the same jobs they were in. It also enables them to take more skilled jobs as a result of their work here.”

Allen says the movement to create the health studies track was also driven by a desire to keep pace with the changing landscape of health-related careers. “There are really active, societal-wide conversations happening about health,” he says. Nationally, there is the debate over the Affordable Care Act and internationally there are pressing issues of global health and international development. “A lot of people have interests in health issues even if they’re not particularly oriented to a health profession.”

On the nursing side, Allen notes the contributions and legacy of Mary Baroni, the outgoing chair of the nursing program, whose passion has been to create a seamless pathway for community college students to earn a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a Ph.D. “She did huge things to advance our capacity to be accessible to students,” he says. “She worked on a policy level to try to have articulation agreements, so students who start a community college program can know when they come to us that they will be ready to step right in.”

As the Nursing and Health Studies Program begins its next 20 years, the focus will remain on providing access to students. Currently, UW Bothell faculty travel to Everett and Mount Vernon to offer the UW Bothell nursing program to students who cannot travel to campus. “We are continuing to study where we need to be as a program to allow students to have access,” says Allen. “Access to our program is going to be one of our central focuses for the foreseeable future.”