North Texas Nursing Consortium &
North Texas Nursing Resource Center

The North Texas Consortium of Professional Nursing Programs and Practice Partners were recently highlighted in the online special section of Journal of Professional Nursing, Volume 27, Issue 6 , November-December 2011 issue.  Link to journal – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/87557223.  The article is titled Academic Partnerships to Increase Nursing Education Capacity:  Centralized Faculty Resource and Clinical Placement Centers.  Contributors to the article included Paulette Burns, Sally Williams, Nell Ard, Carissa Enright, Elizabeth Poster, and Sharon Ransom.  To increase the capacity for graduating the numbers of nurses needed, the region has developed a three-pronged plan to overcome each of these barriers: expansion of partnership members and development of a regional computerized clinical placement center and faculty resource center.

The academic partnership expanded its members to include the 15 schools of nursing, more than 50 hospitals, and the Dallas Fort Worth Hospital Council (DFWHC) Foundation for the purposes of governance of the two proposed computerized centers and strategic planning for increased capacity. The faculty resource center is a centralized, one-stop shop for those interested in teaching and those needing faculty. The Centralized Clinical Placement Center is expected to streamline the nursing student clinical placements process and monitor the numbers of students per site at a given time so as to ensure that placements are at capacity and that schools of nursing benefit fairly in placing students in specialty areas to meet course objectives. If you are interested in learning more about the nursing partnerships or the North Texas Nursing Resource Center, please feel free to contact Sally Williams at swilliams@dfwhcfoundation.org