St. Vincent-Carlow to offer collaborative nursing program
Add Saint Vincent College to the growing list of Westmoreland County institutions hosting undergraduate nursing degree programs.
Saint Vincent, which offers a master’s and doctorate program for nurse anesthetists in conjunction with Excela Health System, will partner with Carlow University beginning this fall to offer a bachelor of science in nursing at its campus near Latrobe.
Prospective students in the collaborative program will be enrolled as Saint Vincent students for their first two years. Although they will continue to study at Saint Vincent during their final two years, students will then be considered Carlow students and will be awarded a degree by Carlow, located in Pittsburgh.
The Saint Vincent-Carlow nursing collaborative joins Seton Hill, which also will launch a nursing program this fall; the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, which is in the second year of its bachelor’s degree program; and Westmoreland County Community College, which offers an associate degree in nursing.
The new programs could help fill projected shortages in the nursing profession, where more than 500,000 experienced nurses are expected to retire over the next four years.
Officials said the program will tap the existing partnership between Saint Vincent and Excela Health and will showcase the college’s state-of-the-art facilities, highlighted by the newly-constructed Liberatore Human Anatomy Laboratory in the James F. Will Engineering and Biomedical Sciences Hall, as well as a planned simulation lab.
Carla Tomas, a faculty member in the Carlow University undergraduate bachelor of science in nursing program since 2012, has served as the interim coordinator at Saint Vincent since last fall. Officials announced this week that she will be coordinator of the new Carlow program at Saint Vincent College.
Carlow, which has a longstanding nursing program at its Oakland campus, boasts that it has had the highest first-time pass rate on national nursing licensing exams in the Pittsburgh area for the past five years.
Information about the new nursing program is available at the Saint Vincent College admission office at 724-805-2500, 800-782-5549, or admissions@stvincent.edu.
Deb Erdley is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Deb at 724-850-1209, derdley@tribweb.com or via Twitter @deberdley_trib.
Deb Erdley is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Deb at derdley@triblive.com.
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