Troy University’s School of Nursing has received two grants totaling $178,070 as part of the first awards announced under Governor Kay Ivey’s Alabama Rural Health Transformation Program.
The awards, announced Aug. 24, are among 138 grants statewide totaling more than $144 million. The program is supported by a $203.4 million first-year federal Rural Health Transformation Program award. TROY’s projects will serve Pike and Coffee counties and are led by Dr. Alisha Hilburn, Dr. Rebecca Allen-Jones, and Jenna Newton.
The larger award, $118,070, will fund an interprofessional training program that brings TROY nursing students and emergency medical services students together through virtual-reality clinical simulations. Students on both sides will log into headsets to practice communication and patient handoffs.
“Our students here will log into the headset, and the EMS students will log into their headset, and they will practice communication,” Allen-Jones said. “One of the things we’ve noticed is in the rural community, a nurse working in a rural setting interacts with EMS a ton. Being able to build that relationship and understand the community you’re working in — and being able to get a good report and give a good report — all of those things are so important, especially in our smaller communities.”
TROY will work with a partner group in Enterprise that has previously collaborated on interprofessional simulations and has ties to an EMS program in that region.
The second award, $60,000, will establish TROY COMPASS, a peer-mentorship and rural workforce development program for Bachelor of Science in Nursing students.
“This is going to be a mentorship program,” Allen-Jones said. The first cohort will include five first-semester students and five incoming first-semester students paired with third-semester students who will serve as mentors. The partnerships will continue as students advance through the program. Fifth-semester students will shift from direct mentoring into planning and support.”
The program will include meetings before classes begin, two weeks after the semester starts, and before the drop/add deadline, along with study halls and other supports.
“We plan on taking them on a field trip once a semester and taking them to somewhere rural that they may not have even thought was somewhere that needed a nurse,” Allen-Jones said.
“We’re hoping to go to the prisons, some of the other rural hospitals, some of the rural clinics and see what’s out there so that when our nurses graduate, they know there’s more than just working in the large hospitals where they went to clinicals.”
Students selected for COMPASS will come from rural communities, including those who want to return home to practice. Grant funds are also intended to help with resources such as scrubs and computers available for checkout.
The new awards continue work begun under TROY’s $1.5 million HRSA RISE simulation grant, which ends this month.
“That was the RISE grant that we wrote, and we got $1.5 million from that one over three years, and it ends in September,” Allen-Jones said. “This one will pick up where it left off, and we’ll keep investing back into the students.”
She said the proposals placed heavy emphasis on reinvestment.
“We wrote these two with a lot of emphasis on reinvesting back into our students and then reinvesting into our faculty,” she said. “Faculty will have an opportunity to go to some trainings that we’ve never been able to do before to bring stuff back, and showing our nurses other sides of healthcare that they typically don’t get to see.”
