The Arkansas State Board of Nursing has closed the nursing program at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff after determining that the school’s administrators and faculty members had failed to correct chronic problems with curriculum, materials and student pass rates on mandatory tests.
The program, authorized in 1974, had no students enrolled for the spring semester and can return to the board in 12 months to obtain approval to reopen.
The board had placed UAPB’s nursing program on probation in 1981, 1992, 2005 and 2010, said Sue Tedford, executive director of the state agency. None of the state’s other nursing programs are currently under probation.
UAPB Interim Chancellor Calvin Johnson said program chairman Jujuan English and the faculty felt they had been making progress in meeting state conditions to be taken off probation, adding that “as you heard the discussion continue, I could see where they were going.”
The state board earlier prohibited new admissions to the program and administrators had hoped to gain board approval Thursday to begin recruiting new students for the fall semester and a new curriculum.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Board members took notice of UAPB’s efforts to develop a new curriculum and to hire new faculty members, but acknowledged it would not be proper to admit new students until the university can remedy all of the program’s problems. Board members said they observed too many problems and inconsistencies in the materials UAPB provided the agency.
The nursing program failed to fulfill eight of the 21 conditions to be reinstated, said Karen McCumpsey, assistant director of the board.
Problems cited with the nursing program: Faculty members did not provide adequate proof that they had completed professional development courses and the department chairman failed to submit faculty development plans; course plans and student handbooks utilized inconsistent grading scales and contained confusing course references, making it difficult for students to enroll in classes and determine what it would take to pass a course, McCumpsey added.
“The lack of documentation for in-service training and the handbook means we failed to dot our I’s and cross our T’s,”Johnson told The Commercial.
Johnson acknowledged it will be difficult to retain hard-to-find faculty members and to pay for continued curriculum development during the next 12 months without nursing students and the tuition revenue that accompanies them.
He said UAPB has no alternative.
“This program is one that we need,” he emphasized. “It is critical.”
Universities and colleges across Arkansas are working to graduate more nursing students to face shortages of health-care professionals.
UAPB hopes to attract students to its high-demand programs, like nursing, to reverse declining enrollment trends, Johnson noted. The university enrolled 2,828 students in the fall semester, 11 percent fewer than it enrolled in the fall 2011 semester.
The UAPB program was placed on probation in July 2010, with the board citing three consecutive years of fewer than 75 percent of graduates passing the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses on the first attempt. In that year, none of the more than 16 nursing program seniors were allowed to graduate after all failed a practice licensure exam required to pass a mandatory course.
At that 2010 meeting, the board threatened to close UAPB’s nursing program if at least three-fourths percent of its graduates couldn’t pass the licensure test for each of the next two years. Three of 15 students passed the exam in 2011, and five of 10 students passed in 2012.
Many of the nursing students enrolled at that time blamed a faculty they said was not prepared to follow a recognized curriculum and develop course plans during interviews with a Commercial reporter.
Two years later the board decided to keep the nursing program on probation, allowing UAPB to recruit new students in 2013 if it could meet the conditions of an extensive agreement that called for continuing education for faculty members, redevelopment of a curriculum with the aid of an outside consultant, regular faculty meetings and redesign of course plans to make standards clear to students.
Johnson said the university hired a consultant and worked diligently to meet the other conditions.
Many of the requirements that UAPB didn’t meet weren’t directly related to the curriculum, Johnson added. Since the March deadline for submitting materials, three of four professors have completed professional development, and the fourth one has plans to attend a conference in May, English said.
English emphasized that the curriculum is well written and well constructed.
The UAPB nursing program is a four-year course, while Southeast Arkansas College has been graduating RNs in 28 months.
In 2011 the university made arrangements for 10 senior nursing students to take remedial training at Southeast Arkansas College at UAPB’s expense during the summer
However, Diann Williams, SEARK’s vice president of assessment and the Nursing/Allied Health Programs, noted that problems were discovered early in the remediation effort because the community college’s faculty did not receive any records from UAPB about the level of training the UAPB nursing students had received.
That same year the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission affirmed the continued accreditation status of the nursing program at UAPB. The university had received continued accreditation from NLNAC since 1979.
The state Department of Higher Education gave UAPB two years to improve the university’s nursing program or the department would recommend funding for the program be discontinued status following the probation status. The department said it conducted a May 2010 review after receiving a number of complaints.
Jim Purcell, the then-director of the Higher Education Department, said UAPB committed to eliminating the problems in the nursing department and voluntarily agreed to put the program on inactive status.
TIMELINE