Graduate School of Nursing Receives $2.7 Million Grant to Enhance Student Experience

The College of Nursing students received a grant to do hands-on work. Photo by Greg Clark.

The University of Rhode Island’s graduate program will receive a $2.7 million grant over the next four years to increase student experience at local healthcare centers and aid in tuition payment. 

With the grant, students will do hands on work in two healthcare center organizations. These two organizations are the Thundermist Health Center and the Providence Community Health Center. These organizations are comprised of 13 healthcare centers and will give students access to approximately 85,000 patients, according to Denise Coppa, associate professor of nursing and director of advanced practice nursing programs. 

Approximately 48 to 56 nursing students throughout the four year period will have even more opportunities to work hands-on with patients in actual healthcare facilities. Each year, the money will help pay the tuition of 14 students in these programs, which will help to continue their nursing education. 

“What [the grant] is doing is helping us maintain academic and clinical partnerships between the College of Nursing and two major healthcare center organizations in Rhode Island,” Coppa said. 

Students from URI’s Nursing Education Center in Providence in the Family Nurse Practitioner, Adult Gerontology and Psychiatric Mental Health programs will benefit from the new grant. “It’s multifaceted project where the top beneficiaries are the nurse practitioner students, but we have great outcomes from the patients that are being taken care of, too,” Coppa said. 

The grant is funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Coppa dedicated her 2018-2019 winter break to writing and developing this grant for graduate-level nursing students. The grant was approved and will be implemented this semester. 

Students will have the ability to work under supervision of nurse practitioners in the healthcare centers or in a home-based setting in some cases. Students will visit the homebound, those extremely ill or unable to leave the home easily. 

Nursing students will participate in this program two days a week as they work towards their total supervised clinical hours, which for nurse practitioner students is 500 hours. 

Rhode Island is one of 22 full-practice authority states. This means once nurse practitioners are licensed in Rhode Island they do not need physician supervision to practice.

“This is what makes it so neat to have a project like this,” Coppa said. “These students are going to get out, actually transform the workforce, and also increase access to care for patients who may have been limited in their access to care.”

Coppa is excited for all these graduate students to benefit from the approval of the grant. 

“We’re going to be able to fund students,” Coppa said. “It pays for one of the faculty members. We have all kinds of data collection going on. It’s helping to educate students in the classroom. It’s also helping us maintain a clinical simulation project that we have so that all students learn about home-based primary healthcare.”

Although Sophomore Nursing Student Katherine Blake is not currently part of the graduate programs, she is excited about all the opportunities the Colleges of Nursing will provide for her and other students in the future. 

“The reason that I chose URI was because of the nursing program here,” Blake said. “Everything that I’ve gone through so far has exceeded my expectations. When I heard the news that the graduate program was getting a grant, I was thrilled because of the multiple opportunities that I now have while pursuing a career for a nurse practitioner. I’m excited for myself in the College of Nursing’s future.”