Hi, my name is Gary Measom and I am Chair of the department of Nursing at UVSC. We have some neat things going on in our department. During the last year we have been able to expand both our Associates and our Bachelors programs. We have the two programs, the Associate degree in nursing which allows you to take the State Board examination and also a program where after you receive your associate degree you can go on and get your Bachelor degree. We have increased the number of students in the Associates program by twenty and the number of students in the Bachelor program by twenty, last year. So this is a real opportunity for all you students who want to be nurses, to increase your chances of being a nurse and getting accepted. We do work well as a faculty. Our faculty is expanding and we are able to take the best technologies of nursing and education and to be able to provide quality education for nurses at UVSC. Talking about space, our lab is probably one of the smallest nursing labs in the state and yet we have a fairly large program here. That causes a problem with scheduling but we are trying to work out a solution to that with the college, but still class room space is very tight here. We are looking to use new technologies and new techniques and new times to be able to teach nursing at UVSC. I hope that you will be able to have a good experience and if you have any questions, please give me a call at 863-8192. One of the big things that we have been able to do is join with the Health Care industry around the valley. Number one we have been able to provide stipends for some of the students in a program from HCA. We are working right now with Utah Valley Clinics to offer a four year scholarship for nurses. We have worked with Inter Mountain Health Care to expand our Bachelor program. All of those things have helped, but we still can use more help in developing the resources. We need to provide better and high quality and continue to provide high quality for the students in Nursing at UVSC. Nursing is one of the very few majors at the college that can guarantee 100% placement after graduation. We still have a shortage of nurses in Utah. If you look at the hospitals and their request for nurses and job applications they still have one or two available but the nursing shortage is real and we are going to continue that because of the number of nurses that are retiring and moving out of state. That is going to be a continuing problem to supply enough nurses to the hospitals and the health care industry in the state. Park City is getting a new hospital, there is a new hospital being built in Sandy. There is another one being built in Draper. There are Home Health agencies that need nurses. There are Nursing Homes that need nurses and all of them are going to need you when you graduate. It is a good profession and you will be able to get a job. One of the things I need to stress, as far as prospective students, is that nursing is a science and while you are in High School you need to have a good background of science and math. That is going to help you to get into nursing and understand the things that you need to study to take care of patients when you are in the hospital or when you are home taking care of patients. There are a lot of people that say our program is the best in the state. I am very bias but I think it is. I have taught in other nursing programs. One in the state and I really do believe that we have a very good nursing program. We are working right now to revise the curriculum so that students will be able to get finished with Nursing in four years. Right know, I don´t think there is any program in the state where you can enter college and get out in four years, it takes longer than that. It will be a hard program but it will be doable. So, I think there are changes that we are looking for, to make your education and the nursing education better in the state of Utah and especially here at UVSC. UVSC Nursing Department has been very fortunate to have some of the most up-to-date equipment that we can us to teach in Nursing. One of these is Human Simulators. Right now we have one full Human Simulator and two that we can use in teaching you to do nursing. Right now we are doing one class or clinical rotation where the students build scenarios of a patient in the hospital and they are able to build the case and then to take care of the patient and they learn from that. All of the time they are taking care of the patient, we are video tape them and then we go back over the video tapes and they are able to see their mistakes. The mistakes are done on a simulator and not on a real person which makes it a very good learning experience and no one gets hurt. This is something that we are proud of. The faculty have given national presentations about Human Simulations and about the way we have been working with simulators and we are going to continue to do that. Another faculty member is using pocket PC´s for patient care. On these PC´s they are able to put information of three or four textbooks, so that when students go to the hospital to take care of patients, they have medications, laboratories, and all of the information on their PC´s. Troy Nelson is working with a company right and going to be doing a research study with the company to see how these pocket PC´s are going to be able to make better nursing education. It is exciting to be a part of some of these new innovations in nursing education. For preparation to be admitted to the Department of Nursing. Right now we admit based on five required classes; College Algebra, Anatomy, Physiology, Chemistry, and English. We look at the GPA of those five classes and then there is an admissions test which is a general knowledge test, called the TES test and you take that down at the Testing Center at UVSC. Again if you look at those classes; Anatomy, Physiology, Chemistry, and College Algebra are all based on sciences and that base allows you to be able to grow and the nursing knowledge to develop while you are in school. So, it is important as a base to get as much science as you can in High School.