Welcome

Welcome to the Web Site of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Nursing. Whether you are surfing the net for information about nursing schools in general, or for information about VCU and our programs in particular, I hope you find our pages helpful and enlightening.

Our Heritage

The VCU School of Nursing has a long and proud heritage. Our lineage stems from a hospital school founded in the 1890's, making us one of the oldest schools in the nation.

Paradoxically, we are very young in terms of being part of a major research university. In 1993, we celebrated both the centennial year of the founding of the program that ultimately became MCV (Virginia Hospital Training School) and our 25th year as a school of VCU. VCU was created by the merger of the Medical College of Virginia and the Richmond Professional Institute.

VCU has the only comprehensive health sciences center in the Commonwealth of Virginia. We are located in Richmond, the state capital, only 93 miles from Washington, DC, the nation's capital.

Education

The School has prepared graduates for initial licensure since it inception in 1893. In the 1950's the entry level program became a baccalaureate degree. In the late 1980's an innovative program providing educational access for RN's returning for baccalaureate education was begun. In the early 1970's a certificate nurse practitioner program was begun and in the mid 1970's the first master's program in nursing was established here at VCU. In the early 1980's the NP certificate program was redeveloped within the masters framework. In the 1990's a revision of the masters curriculum placed us on the cutting edge of the new concept in advanced practice nursing. Post master's certificate program for advanced practice were added for master prepared nurses to prepare for new areas of clinical responsibilities. In the late 1980's a doctoral program in nursing was established.

Research

In the early 1970's the School organized and sponsored the first documented regional nursing research conference ever held in the United States. Today we have a diversity of faculty with strong programs of scholarship, and we participate in many of the regional research programs held throughout the nation. Our faculty research topics are focused in four primary areas: risk and resilience, immunocompetence, health systems, and healing processes.

Service

In the early 1900's Sadie Cabaniss, director of the school, and a group of students and faculty (including a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson) developed a community outreach program to aid the underserved citizens of Richmond. Their efforts led to the establishment of the Instructive Visiting Nurses' Association which continues its work today.

The School has recreated its service arm with a Community Nursing Organization (CNO) that links the scholarship of faculty and students to the needs of the community. The CNO is the mechanism for technology transfer of new knowledge to the actual problems of individuals and agencies functioning in this complex urban environment.

Integration and Coherence

Our School is a dynamic part of an exciting, comprehensive research university. We strive to assure that we meet our social responsibilities to the public trust and to our profession. To that end we focus on actualizing and integrating knowledge development, dissemination, and application in ways that make sense within a community of scholars. This is cutting edge work in the life of an academy. We are striving to demonstrate that the colonial teaching model of this nation and the classic Germanic model of a research university can be, and are in fact, synergistic and coherent in the lives of members of our community. In recognition of this cutting edge work on the organization and its mission as knowledge work our organization has been changed. We have moved from the classic bureaucratic model to an organic model to represent a new way of being together as a community of scholars.

Join Us..

If you are interested in the potential to join with us as faculty, administrative professional, or student, I encourage you to browse our Web Site and contact us about your interest.