FRESNO, Calif. – Fresno State is aiming to strengthen nursing education and training across the San Joaquin Valley after recently being awarded a new grant.
The $186,300 grant was awarded to the university’s Central California Center for Excellence in Nursing by the Foundation for California Community Colleges’ Nursing Education Investment Grant Program. It will support a partnership between 16 nursing programs and 10 clinics throughout the Central Valley.
Dr. Marie Gilbert, the director of the center, said the funding will allow nursing programs to work through nursing challenges together rather than separately.
The grant will fund a project that focuses on three main areas: using data to better coordinate limited clinical placements, improving collaboration efforts between nursing programs and healthcare organizations, and developing faculty and clinical mentors.
“What this grant is going to help us be able to do is look at that data more strategically and look at where our gaps are,” Gilbert said. “We know anecdotally where we're challenged, but I think when you have data to drive decisions, it's more valuable.”
Gilbert said the faculty component of the project is important because it will focus on teaching skills to the faculty such as assessment, coaching, and giving feedback to students.
The goal is to better prepare students to enter the workforce and help improve nurse retention, said Gilbert.
Student nursing challenges of the past
In 2019, Fresno State’s master’s nursing program temporarily lost accreditation from the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education.
Dr. Kathleen Rindahl, director of Fresno State’s School of Nursing, said the loss of accreditation was over miscommunication and a documentation problem during the accreditation process, rather than an issue with the quality of the program.
“When you're filling out what is called the ‘self-study,’ they have four different standards, and you have to answer the standards in the ‘self-study,’” Rindahl said. “If you don't word things exactly the way they want them, or show the evidence that you're doing that, then things get misunderstood.”
The program regained accreditation six months later following a rewrite of the materials. Students weren’t negatively affected by the loss of accreditation, but a new cohort couldn’t be added that fall semester.
Fresno State went through another accreditation review in 2024. This time, the program’s standards and evidence were reviewed for a year. The result was a 10-year reaccreditation with no compliance concerns.
Rindahl said the loss of accreditation provided insight into how to better communicate its work to accreditors, while simultaneously continuing collaboration across the region.
“By collaborating, we can come up with regional solutions that benefit all of the programs and all of the hospitals,” Gilbert said. “What drives this is the patient care and then the health and wellness of our community.”
