Nurse Education, Practice, Quality and Retention - Transition to Practice Program - Through the Nurse Education, Practice, Quality, and Retention Transition to Practice Program (NEPQR-TPP). D'Youville University (DYU) will launch DYU-TPP, a workforce development initiative to prepare and retain a pipeline of practice-ready nurses serving Erie and Niagara Counties in Western New York. Healthcare organizations across the region continue to struggle to recruit and retain registered nurses. A 2024 Center for Health Workforce Studies analysis found that 92.6% of Upstate New York hospitals, the region that includes Erie and Niagara Counties, reported difficulty recruiting registered nurses and 97.1% reported difficulty retaining them, and the region's nurses reported the second-highest burnout rate in the state. New York's nursing schools are not producing enough graduates to keep pace with projected job openings; the New York State Department of Labor projects more than 17,000 annual RN openings statewide through 2032, while the state's nursing programs graduated only 10,286 new RNs in 2024, a shortfall tied in part to ongoing nursing faculty shortages. Nationally, HRSA projects a shortage of roughly 208,000 full-time RNs by 2037, with rural areas facing the steepest gap. Many of the region's clinical partners serve federally designated shortage and medically underserved areas, and rural residents face added barriers, including long travel times and, in winter, lake-effect snow that can cut off access to care. Niagara County, home to more than 208,000 residents, is served by a single hospital maternity unit. DYU's Patricia H. Garman School of Nursing has educated nurses for Western New York for more than 80 years, currently enrolling over 1,000 students and graduating about 200 nurses a year who go on to make up a significant share of the region's healthcare workforce. DYU will open new pathways into its BSN program for students who already bring healthcare experience as CNAs, LPNs, EMTs, community health workers, and other frontline roles, pairing that access with scholarships, mentoring, and structured support so students can persist through a demanding course of study. DYU will also grow academic-clinical partnerships in non-traditional, community-based settings, particularly rural and medically underserved areas, including pop-up clinic sites, a developing public health nursing partnership, and hospital affiliations across its urban, suburban, and rural service area. Faculty and clinical instructor development, including training in competency-based education, will keep pace with this growth. Finally, DYU will expand experiential learning through simulation, including new maternal-child health scenarios that respond directly to the region's documented obstetric access gap. Over the four-year project period, DYU will fund 20 scholarships annually, 80 students in total, reserving at least a quarter of those seats each year for students who already hold a direct-care credential. The University will secure new clinical training agreements in rural and underserved communities, maintain trained adjunct faculty and preceptors at an established ratio each term, and grow a simulation scenario library supported by new equipment and a dedicated Simulation Center Associate. By the project's close, DYU expects a documented rise in BSN-prepared nurses entering practice in rural and medically vulnerable communities, with at least 75% of program completers working in a rural, non-traditional, or medically underserved setting within a year of finishing. DYU intends to carry core elements of the project forward, including the new Special Topics course sequence, the Simulation Center Associate role, and the direct-care-to-BSN pipeline, well beyond the period of federal funding.
