The UNLV School of Nursing received a $2.3 million federal appropriation to advance nursing education that prepares nursing professionals for the challenges of modern health care. The funding supports a collaborative initiative with the Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering and University Medical Center (UMC) to develop innovative educational technologies and a nursing research data center. 

As part of the academic-clinical partnership with the local hospital, UNLV faculty will work with UMC nurses to identify clinical problems for use in undergraduate and graduate nursing education. The collaboration with the Department of Computer Sciences brings faculty together to test and implement digital simulation environments for clinical education and create the UNLV Nursing Data Center to safely integrate electronic medical records from real patients. 

“This investment allows us to rethink nursing education and enables us to integrate advanced digital simulation with real-world critical data, creating learning environments that are not only immersive, but are also deeply relevant to the patients in the communities our students will serve,” said Constance Brooks Johnson, vice president for government and community engagement at UNLV. “This effort also reflects the very best of what a public research university can be. It brings together clinical expertise of the UNLV School of Nursing, the technological innovation of the UNLV College of Engineering, and the real-world insight of our partners at UMC. Together, we are creating an ecosystem where education, research, and practice are fully aligned with service in our community.”

On Monday, Brooks Johnson and other UNLV representatives joined Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto to celebrate the news at the UNLV Clinical Simulation Center.

“We have a serious nursing shortage here — not just in Nevada, but across the country,” said Cortez Masto. “It’s not just that we need more nurses, we need to be able to pay them properly. We need to train nursing students well so we can treat Nevadans to the best of our ability and incentivize them to remain in the nursing profession. It really is all about recruitment and retention.”

Dr. Jennifer Vanderlaan, associate professor at UNLV Nursing, will lead the project alongside Associate Dean for Entry and Prelicensure Education Dr. Angela Silvestri-Elmore, Dr. Kazem Taghva, data analytics chair of the Department of Computer Science at UNLV Engineering, and Dr. Debra Fox, chief nursing officer at UMC. 

Vanderlaan said the project is “interprofessional, interdisciplinary, and deeply rooted in Nevada’s community needs,” and will feature cutting-edge technology upgrades to the UNLV Clinical Simulation Center and the development of custom simulation environments for nursing students.

The project will also feature applications of augmented and virtual reality, which will allow nursing students to practice their skills on avatars in a risk-free environment.

“They can start doing it from day 1,” said Taghva. “They can start training much earlier than they do now.”

This project provides opportunities for hands-on clinical care simulation, health system simulation for doctoral students at the Nursing Data Center, and interdisciplinary learning opportunities for UNLV computer science students to apply computational methods to real-world health care challenges.