Contact: Will Sansom, 210-567-2579
|  |
| (Front row, from left) Ken Andrews, Ph.D., chair of the Baptist Health Foundation of San Antonio Board of Directors, presents the check for $202,500 to School of Nursing Dean Eileen T. Breslin, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, and School of Medicine Dean Francisco González-Scarano, M.D., who also serves as vice president for medical affairs. With them are W. Frank Elston (right), the foundation’s president and CEO, and a number of nursing student scholarship recipients. Half of the foundation's scholarships were awarded to nursing students. | |
 Printer Friendly Format
| |
SAN ANTONIO (Sept. 15, 2010) — The Baptist Health Foundation of San Antonio presented $202,500 to the UT Health Science Center San Antonio on Sept. 15 to support 53 scholarship recipients.
This is the fifth year the foundation has provided scholarships to Health Science Center students. Recipients are pursuing careers in medicine, dentistry, clinical pharmacy, dental hygiene, respiratory care, clinical laboratory sciences, occupational therapy, physician assistant studies, physical therapy and nursing.
Developing nurse leaders “The Baptist Health Foundation is making a significant investment in a large and critically important cadre of health professionals for our region and state,” said William L. Henrich, M.D., MACP, president of the Health Science Center. “Half of the recipients (27 of 53) are studying for leadership positions in the nursing profession, which is noteworthy given the state and national shortages of nurses and nurse educators.”
The relatively young foundation, established in 2005, has now granted 186 scholarships totaling $675,000 to the Health Science Center. “The foundation is pleased that we could increase our grants this year by adding five new scholarships totaling $20,000,” said W. Frank Elston, president and CEO of the Baptist Health Foundation. Ken Andrews, Ph.D., chair of the foundation board, joined Elston in announcing the funding.
Attendees at the presentation included Francisco González-Scarano, M.D., vice president for medical affairs at the Health Science Center and dean of the School of Medicine, and Eileen Breslin, Ph.D., dean of the School of Nursing.
Noting the importance of training nursing faculty to teach the next generation of nurses, the Baptist Health Foundation gave $50,000 to fund 10 scholarships for students pursuing a Ph.D. in nursing.
“These are our future educators,” Dean Breslin said. “They have a passion for nursing.”
Ph.D. students discuss the merits of evidence-based practice Scholarship recipient Therese Rizzo, a Ph.D. in nursing student, said: “I am a firm believer that nursing education and research is the best way to change the profession, and learning is the principal mechanism to do that. Interdisciplinary research is the way to optimize patient care.”
Angela Pal, a Ph.D. in nursing student and scholarship recipient, commented: “I’ve been a nurse for 13 years and have done a lot of things in nursing. I put off going back to school, but eventually realized the academic arena is what provides the evidence base. I want to add to it. My research is evaluating heart transplant outcomes, which is important because so few hearts are currently available for transplantation.”
# # #The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, one of the country’s leading health sciences universities, ranks in the top 3 percent of all institutions worldwide receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. Research and other sponsored program activity totaled a record $259 million in fiscal year 2009. The university’s schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, health professions and graduate biomedical sciences have produced approximately 26,000 graduates. The $739 million operating budget supports eight campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. For more information on the many ways
“We make lives better®,” visit
www.uthscsa.edu.
