Nurse Education, Practice, Quality and Retention - Transition to Practice Program - The Purdue University School of Nursing will implement From Pathway to Practice: Building Indiana's Rural Nursing Workforce to increase the supply of practice-ready registered nurses prepared to serve rural and medically vulnerable communities throughout Indiana. Indiana consistently ranks near the bottom nationally on many measures of population health, including chronic disease burden, behavioral health outcomes, and preventable mortality. Rural communities face even greater challenges, with persistent healthcare workforce shortages, limited access to specialty and behavioral healthcare services, transportation barriers, and growing demand for community-based care. As Indiana's land-grant university, Purdue is uniquely positioned to address these challenges through education, workforce development, and community engagement. The project will establish a comprehensive, scaffolded nursing workforce pathway that supports students from middle school career exploration through high school healthcare pathway programs, nursing education, and transition to practice in rural communities. Working with Indiana Area Health Education Centers (AHEC), Indiana Extension 4-H, rural schools, healthcare career pathway programs, and community partners, Purdue nursing faculty will provide nursing career exploration, mentoring, educational programming, and a week-long residential Nursing Summer Experience that introduces high school students to nursing careers and college pathways. Purdue will also provide technical assistance, teacher support, simulation training, and educational resources to rural healthcare career pathway programs, helping strengthen local program capacity while expanding student exposure to nursing careers. These activities will strengthen recruitment into nursing education, particularly among students from rural communities. Once enrolled, students will participate in a competency-based rural health curriculum integrated throughout Purdue's nationally recognized Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. The project will establish a Rural Nursing Fellows Program that provides scholarships, faculty mentoring, peer mentoring, leadership development, simulation-enhanced learning, community-based clinical experiences and transition-to-practice career bridge activities that connect students with rural healthcare employers prior to graduation. Annually, approximately 100 students will participate in the Rural Nursing Fellows Learning Community and 25 third-year students will complete a 100-hour Rural Health Summer Capstone Experience in rural hospitals, critical access hospitals, federally qualified health centers, and other community-based healthcare settings. The project will expand experiential learning opportunities through investments in simulation, VR, telehealth technology, and rural health simulation scenarios while strengthening community-based training capacity through partnerships with rural healthcare organizations across Indiana. To support long-term workforce development, Purdue will also establish a Rural Nursing Faculty and Preceptor Toolkit that prepares faculty and clinical preceptors to support student learning, mentoring, and transition-to-practice activities. Educational resources developed through the project will be packaged into a Rural Health Nursing Toolkit and Rural Nursing Preceptor Toolkit, creating scalable, evidence-informed resources that can be adopted by nursing programs, healthcare organizations, and workforce development partners throughout Indiana and beyond. The project will serve high school students, undergraduate nursing students, faculty, nurse preceptors, and rural healthcare organizations throughout Indiana. By creating a seamless pathway from early career exploration to workforce entry, the project will strengthen Indiana's rural nursing workforce pipeline, expand access to healthcare services, and improve health outcomes in rural and medically vulnerable communities.
