Thanks for being a subscriber.
Sorry, your subscription does not include this content.
Please contact your publisher to upgrade your subscription.
Perspective
Billings-Berg: VTSU nursing expands
Ready for some good news about nursing in Vermont? I bet you are. I know, reports haven’t always focused on the good news.
As recently as last year, news reports focused on nurses retiring, how we don’t have personnel or facilities to educate new nurses, the high cost of education and how all these factors plus burnout resulted in a shortage of nurses in Vermont and across the country. This leads to the use of expensive traveling nurses to provide essential staffing in our hospitals and community care settings. In short, the news focused on the problems with developing and maintaining our nursing workforce in Vermont.
Here’s the new picture: Vermonters listened to those reports and took action. Our lawmakers, governor, employers and education leaders — at the state and national levels — went to work on breaking down barriers to educating more nurses and invested in new initiatives and creative solutions to make it easier. As a result, I get to share some really good news about what Vermont has been able to accomplish — the net result is that we will be able to enroll more than 50% more nursing students in Vermont State University nursing programs within the next three years. When this expansion is fully realized, we’ll have nearly 1,000 nursing students in our programs at a given time, paving the way for future caregivers who are desperately needed here.
How does that happen? First, more than $6 million in congressionally directed spending funds secured by Sen. Patrick Leahy is going to build more VTSU nursing classroom spaces. Funds will be used to create more facilities to educate students for practice in clinical settings, such as improved labs in our existing Lyndon campus settings and brand-new classrooms in Williston and Johnson. These spaces feature new technology, like a virtual reality immersion room for students to learn clinical judgment in a virtual hospital room, and equipment and software to run full interactive simulations. At our Castleton campus, we were able to create a full telepresence classroom, which will particularly help our practical nursing and associate-degree nursing programs who learn with multiple classrooms connected to one instructor. We owe a special thanks to Sen. Patrick Leahy and our entire delegation for working to bring more resources for nursing to Vermont.
We also thank the Legislature and Gov. Phil Scott — first for providing funding in the amount of $800,000 that made acquisition of new simulation equipment possible at VTSU. Items such as additional low-, medium- and high-fidelity human patient simulators, lab equipment, beds, headwalls, IV pumps, code carts, defibrillators and furniture allow our students the state-of-the-art learning experience they deserve. Lawmakers previously created forgivable loan programs to support nursing students who choose to work in Vermont.
Support from state leaders and the agency of human services will also allow us to enroll more students in master’s-level programs to become nurse educators, who are essential for educating more nurses. The state also allotted more than $3 million to create scholarships, administered through VSAC, for nursing faculty candidates. Thanks to all our elected officials who listened to their community and helped us overcome obstacles to creating a pipeline for the nursing workforce because it’s paying off and it’s exactly the way we’ll begin to turn the tide on our workforce shortage.
Partnerships with employers have also eased the path to becoming a nurse. Local hospitals and other employers have provided funding and employee flexibility for programs that create opportunities for students to work and learn at the same time. For example, a program run through a partnership between VTSU, Community College of Vermont and University of Vermont Health Network’s Central Vermont Medical Center allows a student to work full time to retain full-time salary and benefits while studying to become a Licensed Practical Nurse. Their pre-requisite courses are completed at CCV in year one. Students are then able to apply for admission at VTSU’s Practical Nursing program and begin that coursework in year two.
Academically eligible students then have the option to advance through the Direct Progression for their associate degree in nursing to become a Registered Nurse. These programs allow the students to study to advance their careers with a RN — all while working full time with a flexible working schedule and supportive environment through their employer at CVMC. Students are able to complete some of the coursework and clinicals onsite at CVMC, which reduces the barriers for access to transportation. Apprenticeship opportunities abound at other hospitals and facilities in every corner of the state. All truly good news for both students and their employers.
These hundreds of new students are entering a program with proven success. I’m filled with so much pride to share that our nursing students at all levels passed their National Council Licensure Examinations at a significantly higher rate than the national average. The exams assess critical thinking and clinical judgment skills students learned in nursing school, so it’s a testament to our VTSU programs that nearly all of our graduates passed on the first attempt — whether they were testing at the practical nursing or RN level. I am so proud of our students and faculty and so eager to welcome even more of them to our campus community.
Thank you, Vermont, for contributing to our advancements, our success, our increasingly good news. Our students look forward to taking care of you when you most need it.
Sarah Billings-Berg is Vermont State University dean of Nursing and Health Sciences.
Editorials
Editorial: Mystery in the sky
In Plainfield last month, residents there took to social media after a series of lights were seen in formation flying quickly across the evening sky. A debate ensued in the little central Vermont town that the lights were UFOs; others suggested fighter jets flying in formation to Burlington; others pointed to satellites.
It’s not difficult on a clear night to see satellites or the International Space Station making the rounds above the globe.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has more than 3,000 satellites orbiting planet Earth. One version of the SpaceX — Starlink — regularly causes confusion and is mistaken for a UFO (or as they have been renamed UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena) as they are made up of a string of evenly spaced devices that, when light reflects off them, appear as a formation of objects speeding across the night sky.
We are not saying that’s what the folks in Plainfield saw. One witness said the objects he saw were changing direction very quickly — something a satellite cannot do during its orbit.
Vermont native Garrett Graff has a new book out — “UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life Here … and Out There.” Graff is well-known as a journalist who does his research. His book “Watergate: A New History” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history this year.
“UFO” is a fascinating read in that it shows — time and again — how poorly we act when we do not understand something. Graff walks us through theory about the odds of there being other life in the universe, and the odds that they have evolved enough to visit Earth.
But that is not the premise of the book. Graff is not the expert. So he lets the experts tell the story of UFOs (mostly in North America) through the lens of science and policy. We meet some of the most intriguing minds of our time, and how the monitoring of the skies was a consistent challenge — in perception, through funding, and across egos.
Using declassified documents and media accounts (mostly newspapers) going back decades — some of them within a few years of the discovery of flight — to chronicle how we (as spectators, the military, and the government) try to understand things up there.
Graff reveals the mysteries of bureaucracy and mass communication as much as he looks at high-profile incidents that, in many cases, are breathtaking in their unbelievability. And yet there were so many witnesses with nothing to gain.
Then there is the historical evolution of flight, the creation (and testing) of the atomic bomb, the space race, and now the rampant placement of satellites in the sky. Through that very linear evolution of our species, there are seemingly correlations to sightings, whether that is public interest in UFOs or more reports of sightings. All of it has created a stigma that is mocking and conspiratorial.
He does not go far into scientific theory except to repeatedly have his sources point out that much of the fundamental debate over UFOs/UAPs centers on the fact we do not understand the technology or science behind what we are seeing around us.
Just this week, a news release came across our email promoting a book by an Air Force veteran that hypothesizes “these craft may not be extraterrestrial at all, that they are actually time travelers from the future. These UFOs and UAPs may be us, disappearing in and out of this moment in time to another in the Earth’s future.”
While that sounds like science fiction, the bottom line is: We can’t rule anything out. We just don’t know.
By using documents, interviews and reviewing journals and papers (the research for this book must have been astounding in its scope), Graff presents facts that keep the UFO/UAP discussion grounded. Critics of both books and science have voiced their appreciation that Graff does not presuppose or thrust one theory over another. It is simply an informative chronology of the behind the scenes of one of the biggest mysteries plaguing humankind.
From the promotional material Simon & Schuster has online, “For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on Earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. And yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely seen as a joke, banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs — and the covert, decades-long search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life — is told (by Graff) in a deeply reported and researched history.”
The news release refers to our search for answers as “an extraordinary quest.”
In 2021, a Gallup poll found four in 10 Americans now think some UFOs that people have spotted have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies. That was up from a third saying so two years ago. Half, however, believe all such sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena, while an additional 9% are unsure.
Graff has expertly shown us that UFOs are not a secret; they are a mystery.
