Nursing Graduate School

November 10, 2010

This article originally appeared in The Bison, OBU's student newspaper.

OBU is currently in the process of adding another Master’s program called global nursing.

This will be the second phase of the entire nursing Master’s program that Dr. Lana Bolhouse, dean of the school of nursing said was originally presented before the administration.

“When we originally proposed a nursing Master’s,” Bolhouse said, “it was with the idea that there would be three tracks: one for nurse educators, one for nursing administrators and one called global nursing.”

A consultant for the nursing program at OBU advised Bolhouse not to introduce the whole nursing Master’s at once, but instead to introduce it in stages.

The first one introduced was the nursing educator Master’s, and it has been going on for nearly two years.

The second stage will be the global nursing masters, and the final will be the nursing administration Master’s.

Bolhouse said she hopes the new Master’s program will be available at the beginning of the next academic year.

“I had in our proposal, that a target date would be Aug. 2011,” Bolhouse said, “but we have to go through an approval process, and there’s some other programs that I think the administration wants to take all at the same time for approval. So, that may be a bit ambitious. I would hope that we could start Aug. 2011, but I’m not sure we will be ready. It depends on the approval process.”

This new program will be geared toward those nursing students who want to pursue a career in the mission field. The global nursing masters will teach students about global health not only of the United States, but the global health of other countries such as Africa.

“So, when you start looking at global health, you look at not only the disease processes, but how people their get health care and the differences in health care here and there,” Bolhouse said. “And there are actually some international places that have better health care according to the statistics than we do. So, it’s really looking at health care globally, that’s one issue.”

Another issue is looking at other nurses and how they get their education. One example of this is an Associate degree from a two-year college or a four-year nursing program like what OBU has for its students.

“We’re the only country that has that kind of nurse,” Bolhouse said. “Most of the other countries never chose to do that. So, nursing is different in other countries, especially if a nurse is going to get a license here and then go somewhere else to practice. It would give him or her an overview of a nurse in other areas.”

Bolhouse said she has talked with a couple of graduates from previous classes and said that there was some interest amongst them; these graduates were nurses in the mission field. These nurses could come and take the program when they were on furlough, or they could take a leave of absence.

“I think even [for] missionaries on the field, there is attractiveness about that for them,” Bolhouse said. “I think that there’s a lot of nurses nationally that are interested in missions, even if its doing volunteer mission work like going to Haiti for two or three weeks or something like that once a year.”

Bolhouse said this new Master’s program could also be of interest to those people who travel.

“I had a girl in my nursing class who went to Saudi Arabia for three years and worked in a hospital over there just because she could and was interested in it,” Bolhouse said.

Graduates and current undergraduates are interested in the program, but there is also some interest from prospective students Bolhouse said.

“Frequently I get asked ‘do you have a masters program?’ and many of those are interested in nurse practitioner; we don’t have that,” Bolhouse said. “They don’t know to ask about the global masters because there’s not a lot of them. But when I tell them that we’re going to have that, their eyes light up.”

“This new program definitely has potential,” Bolhouse said, “for lots of interested nurses, and could be great for this university.”

“I think it addresses our vision statement, our mission statement saying engage a diverse world,” Bolhouse said. “OBU has long had students who have gone into the mission field.”

“At one point, I don’t know if this is still true or not, but we had more missionaries than any other university nationally on the mission field,” she said. “So, it’s in keeping with who we are, what we are about.”