Annette Hines, executive director of the Susan S. Morrison School of Nursing at the University of St. Thomas, recently spoke with WCCO Radio about the upcoming commencement for the first class of nurses at St. Thomas and the importance of diversity within the nursing profession.
From the interview:
Host: Annette Hynes, director of the University of St. Thomas School of Nursing: Good morning, thank you so much for joining us. This is such a fun time with these graduation ceremonies, but this is a big deal for St. Thomas, for the Morrison Family College of Health. Can you put this into context for us, what this means, this first commencement for the class of Master of Science in Nursing? ...
Hines: Thank you so much for talking with us about this important event for our community, our state, and the nursing profession. We are so excited to graduate our first group of MSN students – 37 students who will be joining the nursing workforce. As you know, there is a nursing shortage nationally; it is a crisis situation. Thankfully, in the state of Minnesota, we do not rank in the top 10 for nursing shortages, but we have a unique situation here. While we have adequate nursing coverage in the Twin Cities area and other more populated areas, in the rural parts of our state, we are really underserved with the number of nurses available to provide care.
A real focus for our program is to both recruit students from those rural areas, with the hope that they will return to provide care there and to provide learning experiences while they’re here in the School of Nursing so they understand what health care is across many different settings and learn to take care of the whole person.
