Going beyond educating students in the classroom, the nursing department earned a grant earlier this month from Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development worth $180,000.

Chair Amy Hall, associate professor of nursing, said WIRED allocated the money to fund awareness of nursing as a career while recruiting students from underrepresented areas.

It will also support establishing UE’s new simulation lab.

Since WIRED has identified a nursing shortage in the region, the grant gives UE a chance to help lessen the shortage by bringing better-trained nurses into the work force.

Hall said the department will hire a nurse to oversee both recruitment and the Graves Hall lab. The nurse will travel southwestern Indiana, recruiting males and members of minority groups and those from rural areas.

“What I think this grant and the whole project really shows is the way people in a community can work together to solve a really big problem,” Hall said.

She said she hopes the money will have a serious impact on the nursing deficiency in Indiana and inform the population of the possibility of nursing as a career.

Increasing UE’s nursing program from about 25 students per class to about 40 is a goal.

Though still under construction, Dean Lynn Penland, of the College of Education and Health Sciences, said the lab will feature SimMan, a life-sized robot that looks like a human, talks and can be programmed to show symptoms of various diseases.

SimMan also documents students’ actions, letting them know if they are doing things correctly.

But Hall said SimMan is not alone. It has a whole family of immobile robots.

“We can’t make a patient have a heart attack,” Penland said.

The family will provide opportunities for students to increase their clinical skills and become more confident and competent before they begin working on actual patients.

The first half of the lab will be completed next month. The second half is scheduled to be finished during winter recess.

Though the money from the grant applies only to the nursing program, Penland believes it will benefit everyone.

“Any time you strengthen any program on campus, it helps the entire campus,” she said. “We all want to go to a school with a lot of good programs. We hope that we’ll contribute to the university’s efforts to have a more diverse student body.”