Kowalkowski

Curwensville Area High School senior Heath Hawkins has discovered his passion in life and has enrolled at the new UPMC School of Nursing at UPMC Altoona so he can follow where it leads.

The passion is for helping others, and Hawkins discovered it due to the help he received from nurses and other caregivers at Penn Highlands DuBois after undergoing an operation to remove a brain tumor, whose existence was revealed by seizures as an eighth grader, leaving him briefly unable to move or talk.

The nurses “made me feel safe and that it was going to be OK, when it all wasn’t OK” — kind treatment during a vulnerable time that was reprised for him after three subsequent knee operations, and that Hawkins himself learned to practice after he became an emergency medical tech for his local fire department, he said, following an open house for the new nursing school, which will begin holding classes Aug. 31.

Half of the 112 students that will comprise the initial class for the 16-month course have been admitted so far, according to Kelly Aharrah, the school’s coordinator for student records.

Of those accepted students, approximately a third are recent or soon-to-be high school graduates like Hawkins, a third are professionals looking to change careers and a third are current UPMC employees looking for advancement, Aharrah said.

The target of 112 students is based on the number of instructors and the desired instructor-student ratio, as well as capacity limits of labs at the school, which will be sited within the hospital complex’s G Building on Howard Avenue, officials said.

There are schools that only accept “the upper crust” of applicants, while dismissing the rest, school director Jennifer Kowalkowski said at the open house, addressing 25 people, 17 of them students, many accompanied by family members.

Kowalkowski doesn’t plan to operate that way.

“I think anyone can be a nurse,” she said.

Some people struggle with tests, but if a student is passionate about the profession and willing to work at learning what’s necessary, she or he can make it, according to Kowalkowski.

Students need to have passed their classes in high school, but the nursing school doesn’t have a prior grade point average requirement — although once admitted, students need to maintain a 2.0 GPA to remain eligible for federal funding, according to Kristin Dershem, supervisor of financial aid.

Typically, for nursing courses, the highest percentage of “fallouts” occur during the first term, according to Kowalkowski.

In some nursing programs, a quarter drop out then, she said.

It’s not always about academics.

“A lot of that is life,” she said.

It can happen when students struggle as single parents, or with providing day care for their kids or with supporting their own parents or grandparents, she said.

There’s no definitive guarantee of a job at UPMC Altoona when the course is done, but the chances of being hired are more than 99%, Kowalkowski said.

The students’ clinical rotation experiences will comprise their job interviews, according to Dershem.

The professionalism they show at that time will be critical, Dershem said.

It is during that time that students learn that “you really need to show up for patients,” Kowalkowski said. “You’ve got to be committed,” she added.

Conversely, those rotations will enable the students to identify a unit they like, Dershem said.

The likelihood of employment opportunities following graduation relates to the current high number — more than 100 — of travel nurses working at the hospital, a situation that is “a huge driver” for creation of the school, according to Kowalkowski.

“Not one organization in the universe” wants to employ agency nurses — not because they’re bad, but because “they’re wildly expensive,” she said.

It goes beyond the strictly financial: management prefers nurses “who know this community” and who are likely to remain here, Kowalkowski said.

The best way to ensure there are such nurses in high numbers is to train them, employ them “and let them grow professionally,” she said. “People will be doing cartwheels in the hallway” if the school graduates 100 who subsequently get hired.

She’s been around long enough to know inauthentic behavior, and management’s enthusiasm for the new program is genuine, Kowalkowski told the prospective students.

The new school is not only important for the hospital, but for the community as a whole, said another program official.

People are thrilled that the local hospital will have a nursing education program again, after the much-mourned closure of the Altoona Hospital School of Nursing in 1996, following 92 years of operation, officials said.

The new program will be School of Nursing 2.0, Kowalkowski said.

The buildup to starting classes seems to be on schedule, according to Kowalkowski.

That buildup has included obtaining accreditation and ordering supplies and equipment, some of which requires significant lead time before it arrives, she said.

The school will strive to produce nurses who are competent in the required skills of observation, holistic assessment, administering of medicines and treatment and the personal care of patients — along with patient education, she said.

Nurses need to ask the right questions and to understand their patients’ stories, she said.

“I feel very good about where we are,” she said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.