Funded by a $21.8-million grant from Triumph Gulf Coast, Northwest Florida State College’s nursing program is in year two of a major capital expansion to help meet the region’s pressing need for more qualified nurses.
The grant is the largest in NWFSC’s history and the third largest in Triumph’s seven-year existence. The college’s grant funds will be distributed in annual increments through 2030.
The NWFSC expansion project consists of four parts: 1) Renovation and expansion of the college’s Niceville Campus Health Sciences building to approximately 70,000 square feet; 2) Integration of instructional enhancements through virtual technology; 3) Professional development for faculty; and 4) Increased accessibility of pre-nursing coursework to support a pipeline of students.
Tanya Beauregard, NWFSC director of nursing, and Charlotte Kuss, dean of health sciences, spoke with FLORIDA TREND about the impact the grant will have on its nursing programs.
Kuss: The grant provides funding to double the size of our nursing program. The goal, which will take us a few years to get there, is to increase the annual number of our graduates from 70 to 140, with the vast majority of that larger number being BS degrees in nursing.
Beauregard: The grant has allowed us to identify areas that we really want to focus on to improve patient outcomes. We are working with a software developer to develop extended reality models built specifically for our nursing program. We’re currently working with a hospital ER to really immerse our students in things that we saw as maybe areas that we were a little bit weak on.
Beauregard: We’ve created most of our learning spaces as a kind of hybrid classroom lab space that are set up so that an instructor can teach something so that the students can immediately get up and start applying what they are learning.
Kuss: The demand for nurses in Northwest Florida is so great, we can place 100% of our graduates with a job even before they graduate.