The WSU College of Health Professions offers a wide variety of degree programs, organized within three schools: nursing, health sciences and oral health. The college places graduates in some of the fastest-growing, highest-paying health careers of the next decade.
Grace E. Chicken, an associate professor at WSU, was appointed acting director of nursing in 1968 to create the baccalaureate program approved by the Kansas Board of Regents. The tide was turning in nursing education nationwide, and Wichita State set its sights on being on the forefront of offering a quality bachelor’s program.
From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, almost every nurse in America had gone through a diploma program offered by hospital-based nursing schools.
One thing WSU has always done well is work with the health-care professionals in Wichita, the state’s top city for medical care, says Betty Smith-Campbell, director of today’s School of Nursing. By gathering faculty members who were good clinicians with strong leadership skills throughout its history, the school has been able “to develop programs that meet the needs of the health-care community, the people of Kansas and society,” she says.
Retired WSU administrator Marty Shawver, nursing program chair from 1976-87, knew it would be important to involve local professionals, particularly at the three hospitals with diploma programs.
Together with the director of nursing at then-St. Francis Hospital, she co-founded a coalition of faculty and professionals that worked together to address the future of nursing education and how to meet industry’s and society’s needs. “Times were changing in nursing education,” Shawver notes. Eventually all three diploma programs in Wichita closed.
Nearly a decade after starting its bachelor’s program, WSU scored another coup – starting the second graduate degree program in nursing within the Kansas Regents’ system, she says. As nursing education became a hot career, more nurses needed master’s degrees to teach.
“We were a major feeder for that, plus our program worked with part-time commuters from all parts of Kansas by scheduling 9-credit-hour classes in one full day,” Shawver remembers.
The School of Nursing has continued to adapt to nursing education demands. Studies show that better educated nurses make for better patient outcomes. Wichita State began the state’s first RN to BSN degree program; now there are more than a dozen such programs in Kansas.
The WSU School of Nursing offers a total of seven undergraduate programs and three graduate programs, with the Doctor of Nursing Practice being the most recent addition. The school has graduated scores of dedicated nurses, who have contributed to all areas of nursing. Meet five of SON’s standouts:
Arneatha Martin ’75/80 remembers heeding the advice of fellow student, Frankie Manning, a nursing supervisor at Wichita’s Veterans Administration hospital. “She told a small group of us that if we wanted to change nursing and have an impact, we needed to get our BSN rather than go to a diploma school. I was the only one who listened,” Martin says.
Martin went on to a career that featured creating a community-based clinic emphasizing prevention and state-of-the art health care for an underserved demographic. After raising $2 million in local support, she opened the Center for Health and Wellness in northeast Wichita in 1998. She retired as the clinic’s CEO in 2006 and serves on its board.
She credits faculty and fellow students, who were so enthusiastic about WSU’s relatively new nursing programs and its foray into a new frontier, with helping her get the tools she needed, including leadership and management skills, along with patient-care skills.
Just a year after graduating from WSU, Dan Gross ’77 had a supervisory role at the Osteopathic Hospital in Wichita. Now he is executive vice president of hospital operations with the major medical provider Sharp HealthCare in San Diego. “I was highly sought after following graduation,” Gross recalls. A first-generation college student, he calls WSU’s nursing school “very progressive in moving the nursing profession forward. The education I got there ensured I was well prepared to function independently and autonomously.”
He remembers learning observation and assessment skills in one course in particular. The instructor passed around a tray of 30 instruments, put it away and then asked the students to recall all the instruments they’d just seen. He recalls students being encouraged to get involved in professional organizations and being mentored by faculty “to give back to the profession and be engaged.” He’s done that very well – his résumé lists a dozen professional affiliations.
Shirley Orr ’79/83 had a personal interest in getting involved with public health care. Her mother was affected by polio as a child. As Orr learned about her mother’s preventable disease, she was driven to find ways to help others live safer, healthier lives.
Orr says getting both perspectives of nursing and business leadership in a now-defunct interdisciplinary administrative track of the master’s degree helped her career, including being the liaison for 20 years between Kansas’ 105 local health departments and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
In 2009, she was selected as a Robert Woods Johnson Foundation Executive Nurse Fellow, where she helps advance public health as a way for prevention and overall population health and a vehicle from which to address disparities in health care and poor health outcomes.
“One of the very strong elements (of my education) was that the school was on the leading edge of being about community-based programs and that there was more to nursing than just a job in a clinical setting. Wichita State was definitely instrumental in helping me understand and think across various systems, disciplines and agencies,” says Orr, who now owns and heads up a public health consulting business.
Janice Unruh Davidson ’81/84 knew WSU was the school for her. Her dad, LaVurne Unruh, had played on the University of Wichita basketball team in the 1940s. Working as a graduate assistant for Marty Shawver, then-chair of nursing, influenced her decision to become a nursing educator.
Davidson went on to tenured academic and administrative leadership positions at Bethel College and Fort Hays State University in Kansas and at Mississippi University for Women and Walden University. She now teaches online courses with the Chamberlain College of Nursing.
Her health-care consulting firms, for which she was recognized in 2010 among the American Business Women’s Association Top Ten Women in U.S. Business, benefited from the networking and leadership skills she acquired through her stints in the Student Government Association at Wichita State, she says, adding that she was encouraged by both students and faculty to represent the College of Health Professionals in the SGA Senate. She and her family recently moved to Hillsboro, Kan.
United States Air Force Col. Karen Weis ’86 says the WSU School of Nursing gave her “a phenomenal education. At Wichita State, we had such excellent clinical experiences. Other universities with clinical instructors don’t have the same breadth and depth as WSU. I hear of nurses coming out of schools now who haven’t done IVs, haven’t done shots – and that’s not good.”
Weis has had an exemplary 26-year career as a military nurse, including two deployments to Afghanistan, where she directed a Joint Combat Casualty Research Team, overseeing 70 protocols with 12 military researchers who sought to improve combat medical care. She’s also served as dean of the Air Force’s School of Aerospace Medicine, and as a consultant to the Air Force Surgeon General on nursing research, garnering more than $1 million in funding. She recently was appointed dean of the military’s Medical and Education Training Campus in San Antonio, Texas.
