Article and photos by Ethan Nahté
[Ed. The following article is a more in-depth version of that appearing in the May 29, 2024, issue of The Polk County Pulse.]
University of Arkansas Rich Mountain has recently been the recipient of $12.6 million. Part of that money comes from a recent ALIGN grant [see The Polk County Pulse, May 15, 2024] to increase Arkansas’ nursing pipeline. UARM received $645, 850 of the $20 million awarded. UARM was one of 19 colleges to receive that grant money.
The college has also received a stimulation grant for $12 million.
Phillip Wilson, chancellor of UARM, said, “We’re going to build a building with that. That’s going to be a yet-to-be-determined square footage, but it’s going to be a big building. It will be in cooperation and partnership with Mena Regional Hospital. We want to have this facility support all our Allied Health needs alongside working with the hospital.”
Krystal Thrailkill, vice chancellor of Academic Affairs at UARM, said, “Right now, we’ve been in discussion with them about a medical lab facility. They want to expand their services, so they don’t have to ship them off.
“We talked about occupational therapy. For us, it would be occupational therapy assistant; for them, it would be occupational therapy. We would use that space as a working relationship with the hospital. So, occupational therapy, physical therapy, nursing, obviously. This money is for a simulation grant — a whole lab — that includes five manikins.”
“This is probably one of the larger grants we’ve ever gotten for an academic need,” Wilson said.
“We’ve got another one out right now,” Thrailkill said, “for LPN, Licensed Practical Nursing, for high school. If that gets approved, it’s another $600,000.”
Wilson said, “This one will specifically be able to support our LPN and our RN students’ needs. Allied Health EMTs will be using that, as well, that simulation lab and those manikins. It’s a lot of money, but it’s not that much money when you talk about [the fact] we only get three full-size manikins, then one child and one baby. We already have one that is a birth mom, and she can have a baby. We got that several years ago, but she was she was $80,000. Now, these manikins run almost $100,000 apiece.”
Wilson said, “The simulation allows our students, especially when they are doing clinical rounds, they don’t have to go all over the place. They can do it now, here.”
Thrailkill said, “Up to 50% can be done in simulation.”
“It’s a big deal,” Wilson said. “This will cut down on cost for them, simply because of travel. These are so advanced, technically, they can almost simulate way more than they can’t.
“They’ll freak you out if you’ve ever been in here with one of these,” Thrailkill said. “They cough and stuff on their own when you’re doing something else. They’re programmed like when they’re sleeping, and their eyes will flick open. It’s not like when we had those baby dolls and their eyes closed. These move like a person. They’ll throw up. They’re very advanced.”
“You can put intravenous injections in them,” Wilson added. “It’s real world and it’s high stress. In fact, it can be very difficult. You’ve got to have a specially trained individual to program these life-size, real-world simulations. They can really, really, really put them in the most unique situations.”
“We’re going to create an ICU lab down at the end of the [Maddox Building] hallway for right now,” Thrailkill said. “We’ll move them when this comes online. We’ll have three years from start to finish. The grant will go in on June 9, and then starting in September the clock is ticking. We have three years to get it from a piece of paper to opening the doors.”
“We’re thinking this is going to easily be over 15,000 square feet,” Wilson said. “It’s going to be as big as the Ouachita Center. It won’t be as high, but this is going to be a huge facility. We’re super-excited. It’s going to be built so it meets the current needs of the hospital and all of the local doctors’ offices. We want to make sure that we’re supporting them.
“The governor’s wants right now are for us to be able to produce more LPNs and RNs than we have now because Arkansas is in desperate need. There’s a shortage. The pandemic definitely affected that. A lot of older nurses got out of the business — retired— said enough and burned out on it. That’s leaving a void. Now they’re even wanting to reach down here to the high school level, which…”
“Has its own challenges.” Thrailkill said, filling in the blank.
“That’s a great way of putting it,” Wilson said. “It’s a wild adventure and is also a bit scary to have to reach down that far. But there is such a critical need from the most entry-level medical field to the most advanced. Right now, we’re doing everything from CNA, phlebotomy, EMT, we’re introducing paramedic, we’re going into LPN and RN. We want to get into OTA — we’re discussing that, and possibly PTA and possibly Rad Tech.
“With this building, it gives us the space. With grants like this, it gives us the technology to do things that we were once not able to do.”
The building will be on the corner of Morrow Street and College Drive, adjacent to the hospital and Nidec. It’ll be by the UARM sign on the hill that overlooks the college campus.
“We want the hospital to have easy access,” Wilson said. “We’ll use our parking lot for our students. The hospital, there will be a walkway to the front door. They’ll have to cross College [Drive]. Where the two main entrances are on the front of the hospital, there will be a sidewalk there.
“This is probably one of the coolest things we’ve been able to do. It just strengthens our relationship with Mena Regional. That’s very exciting. We’re going to have a live operating component of the hospital in this facility.
There’s been talk of expanding the rural health workforce in an attempt to have more doctors and nurses working in rural areas vs. always heading to the cities.
Wilson said, “What you are seeing is exactly that. Our students, over the process of the last 10 to 15 years — maybe even going back 20, we’ve seen the pathway from legitimately CNA to LPN to RN now to nurse practitioners. The number of nurse practitioners, and there are some physician’s assistants, but definitely more nurse practitioners here locally, is the business model that exists right now. We’ve got a new emergent care on the edge of town. We have the walk-in facilities, like Mena Medical Associates, and other medical facilities like Healthy Connections All of those are really heavily reliant upon nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants.
‘This is going to give us a prime pipeline so when they get done here as a RN, they can go and apply and do nurse practitioning online. We have to grow our own.”
Thrailkill said, “A lot of people are not aware that if you came to us for two years vs. going to UA Fort Smith, that you can get the same license up there in four years that you can get here in two. If you are wanting to immediately go to work in the field, then you should come here to us.
“They are going to have you take all of your social science, English, math and all of that just like you could here with an AA degree. What they do is they have you do those first, and then you take this as the last two years at UA Fort Smith. With us, it’s the first two. If you want to get your bachelors after you’re done here, you could do freshman- sophomore-level courses online while you work. It’s backwards from what a BSN program does, but it’s designed to put you to work as a nurse.”
Who knows? At some point, perhaps UARM can grow to become similar to UAMS with its medical training.
“Anytime we can partner with UAMS, we’re looking into that,” Wilson said. “That’s definitely down-the-road type of thinking. There are a lot of regulatory issues you have to get past for us to be able to do something at that level. When you get a facility like this, it changes the dynamic for us.”
Thrailkill said, “We become more viable… more attractive. They’ll say, ‘They have this facility. What can they bring over here?’ Whether you’re talking about any kind of Continuing Ed or something like that, we would have the facility that would be comparable to something they need.”
“You can start thinking about the potential of the tourism growth with the [mountain bike] trails. If the trails take off, this pipeline that we’re going to have to create is going to be that much more stressed and we’re going to have to do more. This facility, these dollars… are just mission critical to that for the big picture.”
Once finished, the new facility will more than likely have an increased impact on the number of college applicants and staff wanting to attend UARM. The data is currently unavailable.
“The challenge that we have is really not something we can control because the State Nursing Board sets requirements for us to only allow a certain percentage of students with a certain number of instructors.” Wilson said.
“The good news is that with the clinical simulation you can do more.” Thrailkill said.
Wilson said, “We anticipate the LPN pipeline to stay in the upper-20s to mid-30s, and the RN we want to see that stay pretty consistent at 16 to 24, or maybe even 30 [students]. There are challenges that we have to get past that. We have to play some of the regulatory games necessary to do such. As Krystal said, these dollars where you have simulation, we can do more now. When you send a student to a hospital or to a clinic, the number of humans is completely controlled by the number of available professionals you have available. You may not be able to send as many students to Mena Regional because they don’t have enough licensed professionals on staff and on duty to get your time in. With simulation, we can run a lot more through.”
“It’s a lot more cost-efficient for us,” Thrailkill said, “because we don’t have to pay those adjunct instructors. The reason we have so many clinical hours is because of where we live. You don’t know what you’re going to see. When you go to the ER, you just don’t know, which is why we ended up with the simulation mom. We wanted to make sure our students had that experience. You can’t plan on when someone’s going to be having a baby. If it happens to be your clinical day and oh! lucky or unlucky.”
Wilson explained, “Students are required to have certain events. They have to have the clinical event, and if they don’t happen, you have to keep going and going. One might be a high-risk pregnancy. If you don’t have someone coming in that’s high-risk and you’re there Friday, Saturday, Sunday and no one’s having a baby, we could simulate that now with the sim mom.”
“When we get to the new building, the way we’re going to set that one up, it will be like a critical care. It’ll look like a brand-new hospital the way it’s set up with the nurse’s station in the middle and the rooms around. We can simulate if their kidneys fail after they’ve had surgery and all of these different traumatic events because they are so lifelike. You could have three different crises going on at once, which is exactly what would happen in an ICU unit in a larger place. Worst-case scenario, the hospital would be interested in this, if we had to have extra beds, these are absolutely set up with the oxygen and everything to where you could move the manikin out of the way. These are brand-new Stryker medical surgical hospital beds.”
Thrailkill said, “We’re looking at the $12 million and we’re saying, ‘I don’t know if that enough.’ We should’ve asked for $20 [million]. We didn’t know. We asked for $12 and we hoped we would get $10.”
“We really thought we’d be tickled to death if we got $8 million,” Wilson added. “Senator Boozman has been an extreme friend to us and we can’t think him enough.”
About Author
