SCF Foundation - Inspire Magazine Fall 2019

The need for health care providers has grown steadily as the populations of Manatee and Sarasota counties have exploded over the last 20 years and with no end to the region’s growth in sight. By 2010, local hospitals were facing an urgent shortage of nursing personnel, especially nurses with four-year degrees, and turned to the local higher education community for help. SCF, then Manatee Community College, answered the call to action with an ambitious plan to provide current registered nurses (RN) the opportunity to obtain a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree. SCF’s BSN degree is still answering that call today. In less than 10 years, the College has graduated more than 1,000 BSN-prepared nurses.

Graduating 1,000+ BSN nurses in less than 10 years is a testament to both the responsiveness of SCF to the region’s needs and the faith the community had to entrust the College with strengthening key sectors of the workforce. When an urgent need emerged, the College jumped into action and made a seismic addition by offering the nursing bachelor’s degree for the first time.

SCF has earned the trust of the medical community over more than five decades of training RNs. In turn, the medical community delivered its full support to SCF throughout the process of planning to offer the RN-BSN program and accompanied SCF “on the bus” to Tallahassee when the time came to pitch the new program to the Florida Board of Education on March 17, 2009. Representatives from Blake Medical Center, Doctors Hospital, Englewood Community Hospital, Manatee Memorial Hospital and Sarasota Memorial Hospital made the trip to the capital with the SCF senior leadership team. It proved to be a date worth celebrating as the proposal for addition of the BSN program won unanimous approval.

The partnership between SCF and area hospitals is stronger today than it has ever been. Local medical centers contribute thousands of dollars toward nursing scholarships. Every major medical facility in the region employs nurses trained at SCF. With population growth continuing, the need for more nurses remains. Graduating 1,000 BSN nurses is a benchmark, not an endpoint for the task SCF has undertaken.

Training so many workforce-ready nurses would be impossible without topnotch faculty and modern facilities. The 42,000 sq. ft. Medical Technology and Simulation Center at SCF Lakewood Ranch is among the most technologically advanced nurse training sites in the region and every full-time BSN faculty member holds a doctoral degree.

RegisteredNursing.org ranked SCF as the number one online RN-to-BSN program in Florida. The same website consistently ranks SCF’s ASN RN program among the best in the state.

When entrusted with a matter of such vital importance, SCF delivered on its promise! There are more than 1,000 BSN nurses to prove it.

For more information about SCF’s Nursing program, visit SCF.edu/Nursing.

This story originally appeared in the Nov. 2019 edition of INSPIRE Magazine.