UT creates homeland security nursing program

“Nobody really thinks of a nurse as a war fighter,” said Capt. Roberta Lavin, chief policy officer for the U.S. Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and a UT nursing graduate.

“However, when the war you are fighting is against agents you don’t see, like anthrax, viruses and radiation, then it takes a health care person to be the actual soldier,” she said.

UT’s College of Nursing announced Wednesday that it has received a three-year, $650,879 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to create a master’s and doctorate program specializing in homeland security nursing.

The program will offer two tracks — one concentrating on managing health care in large-scale disasters and the other in advanced clinical nursing practices for victims of hurricanes to dirty bombs.

The nursing school will rely heavily on local, state and federal agencies, including the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and other colleges within the university for expertise on everything from the characteristics of toxins to the coordination of emergency responders.

Retired Major Gen. John Doesburg, who heads homeland security at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said the university nursing program is a first step in meeting civilian training needs he saw in the late 1990s while leading the national domestic preparedness program.

“We see the genesis of a program that is now going to take care of those problems I couldn’t take care of, the training of our medical professionals,” he said.

The first classes will begin this fall with openings for about a dozen students, program director Susan Speraw said. The program will last three to six semesters, depending on the focus of study, including internships in the field.

“We are not going to train people how to be nurses,” Speraw said. “We are going to build on their base of expertise.”

Applicants must already have a couple of years’ experience in an emergency room, an acute care setting or in some related management capacity.

“What we will be adding to that is a new layer of complexity,” Speraw said. “We will be training nurses how to deal with people who are critically ill as a result of radiation exposure … but we also want to be sure the caregivers don’t become as ill as the people they are trying to take care of.”

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UT Nursing: http://nightingale.con.utk.edu