VA-UF Nursing Center of Excellence
About the Center
The VA-UF partnership will fund new faculty, who will give students more opportunities to gain clinical experience at the VA. In the first year of the partnership, five new faculty members will come on board, two UF-based, two VA-based and one who will serve as an evidence-based practice nurse coordinator.
The new faculty members will be embedded in four model nursing units at local VA hospitals. The program will develop and evaluate these innovative nursing units, which will provide evidence-based nursing care for patients while implementing clinical supervision for nursing students and encouraging staff development to boost recruitment and retention of nurses.
Data will be collected before and after these model units are implemented to measure patient and nurse satisfaction, educational outcomes, student and faculty satisfaction, and other factors. Increases in recruitment and retention of baccalaureate-prepared nurses in North Florida’s VA health system will also be evaluated.
The partnership also will create an advanced residency program to support new graduates during the transition to professional practice and an internship program aimed at improving recruitment and retention of new graduates.
In addition, UF faculty members and their VA counterparts will implement a skin and wound healing education and research program and a perioperative and intensive care clinical and research program.
To address the ever-growing nursing faculty shortage, a faculty development program will be provided for those nurses hired to be joint UF and VA faculty members. These faculty members will be assigned a UF faculty mentor. VA staff nurses also will have the opportunity to participate in the college’s nursing resource center, assisting with the teaching of clinical skills to help meet the learning needs of the additional students admitted to the program.