By Kristi Birch

When Jean Giddens, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, ANEF, left her position as dean of Virginia Commonwealth University’s nursing school to become dean of the University of Kansas School of Nursing in April 2024, she was already very familiar with KU. The daughter of a long-time KU physician, Giddens had grown up a couple of miles from the school’s campus in Kansas City, and she earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) there in 1981.

But Giddens was also more than Jayhawk born and bred. She returned to her hometown as a well-known scholar, a national leader in nursing education and the chair of the Board of Directors for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). And she was ready to help her alma mater think big.

Since her arrival just two years ago, KU School of Nursing has made numerous changes with a vision that extends beyond the confines of its campuses in Kansas City and Salina. These changes were designed to do more than boost the school’s rankings or affect its bottom line. They aim to address the nursing shortage across the state and to produce nurses better prepared to practice in tomorrow’s complex healthcare environments.

The school looked both inward and outward to rethink and revise its mission and goals, its organization, its practice, its academic program offerings and its curriculum. Some people might think the best way to effect such changes is incrementally. But Giddens sees it differently.

“It’s a matter of laying out a plan. Many things happened at the same time because they needed to fit together,” she said. “Everything we have accomplished at the school has been strategic.”

A new plan, a new structure

Giddens spent her first few weeks as dean listening to her colleagues and learning the ins and outs of the school. She then began the process of reorganizing the school to be more in alignment with typical structures at other nationally recognized schools of nursing. That included creating faculty departments and appointing two senior academic leaders to lead the graduate and undergraduate programs. Other departments include Administration and Finance; Grants and Research; and Student Affairs, which oversees recruitment, admissions and strategic enrollment.

In summer 2024, Giddens convened a task force composed of faculty and staff to evaluate the school’s academic programs against local and national trends. They ordered a special report from the AACN that looked at data, including programs offered and enrollment trends, for five neighboring states: Colorado, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma. The taskforce considered those data against other factors, such as where students are currently getting jobs and projected nursing needs for the future.

“The data alone don’t tell you what to do,” said Giddens. “You have to talk with employers and ask yourself, for example, do we not have any programs in a certain area because there’s no demand? Or is that an opportunity that nobody else is offering?”

Revised program offerings

One result of their analysis — and in response to a growing aging population — the school will offer an adult gerontology, acute care nurse practitioner specialty track in the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program and as a post-master’s certificate program, starting in 2026.

Additionally, the school made the decision to phase out the existing master’s degree program and replace it with a new direct-entry Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) degree. This program allows people who already hold bachelor’s degrees in other fields to begin their nursing education at the master’s level. By easing the way for people with other kinds of education and training to transition into nursing, this direct-entry program provides another way to address the nursing shortage, which is expected to continue as baby boomers retire. Launching in fall 2027, it will be the only program of its kind in the region.

The direct-entry program is one facet of the school’s effort to increase its number of prelicensure students, with the expectation that these graduates will then pass the national licensure exam and become nurses in a state in dire need of them. Last year, for the first time, in addition to admitting students in the fall, the school admitted 30 BSN students who began their studies in the spring.

“That spring cohort is growing to 60 students this year,” said Heather Black, Ed.D., associate dean for student affairs at KU School of Nursing. “So in just one year, we will have doubled it.”

Also beginning in fall 2026, students enrolled at McPherson College in central Kansas will have an option to pursue a bachelor’s degree from KU School of Nursing. After completing two years of prerequisite nursing courses on the McPherson campus, they will complete the remaining 60 credits of nursing courses 35 miles away on the KU campus in Salina, and online.

In addition to increasing the number of graduates, the hope is that, since these students do not need to relocate, more of them will choose to practice in central Kansas or other rural areas, where more nurses are needed to provide access to care.

Meanwhile, KU School of Nursing is making its community college partnership program more flexible. The program enables students to earn an associate degree at a community college and a BSN online from KU simultaneously. In the past, students were required to begin the BSN program when they began their associate degree. The new plan is to allow students to enter the BSN program later, with the expectation that such flexibility increases the number of students in the program.

By 2030, Giddens said, the school plans to have doubled the number of prelicensure graduates who will then launch their nursing careers.

A new curriculum

Overlaying all of those program changes is a new curriculum. And this isn’t just for new or altered degree programs. It’s a revised curriculum for every single program at the school. Based on the AACN’s “Essentials” — standards that outline the necessary curriculum content and expected competencies of graduates from undergraduate and graduate nursing programs — the redesign is a shift from a traditional curriculum to a competency-based one.

“The essence of a competency-based curriculum is all about the output,” said Laura Klenke-Borgmann, Ph.D., RN, CHSE associate dean of undergraduate programs, who has led the redesign. “It’s about what the students can actually show us and what they can actually do.”

Competency-based education aims to fill in the “academic practice gap,” which is the difference between what students know, based on test results, and what hands-on skills they can demonstrate. These competencies are more than practical abilities such inserting an IV or drawing blood. They also include things like developing good communication, coordinating and planning care, exercising good clinical judgment and solving problems.

Nursing students have always had labs and clinical practice to apply what they learned in the classroom. But in the new curriculum, these experiences will be more numerous and integrated. Each semester will include a course titled Applied Practice that requires students to demonstrate the knowledge learned in class.

“As soon as they’re learning about something in the classroom, later that week they’re going to lab and doing the hands-on part, where sometimes before it wasn’t in such a tight alignment,” Klenke-Borgmann said.

The school also sought input from The University of Kansas Health System by including members of the health system on the curriculum redesign taskforce.

“They were really helping us identify the gaps they’re seeing in new graduates and how can we backfill that with our new curriculum,” said Klenke-Borgmann.

The school developed the new curriculum for all its nursing programs all at the same time. As Giddens pointed out, to follow AACN guidelines for competency-based education, the level-two, or advanced nursing programs, must build on level-one pre-licensure program competencies. And the way to get the programs to fit together was to build them together, Giddens said. Initiated in 2025, the new curriculum will launch in fall of 2026, less than two years later.

“It was a little crazy,” said Giddens. “And it was probably one of our biggest accomplishments this year.”

Supporting students and faculty

Making such broad changes necessitates supporting students and faculty in those changes. That’s why the Student Affairs office, which supports the outside-the-classroom student experience, is busy creating a new orientation program that, for example, prepares students for competency-based assessments that come with the new curriculum, which are different than the written test and grade-oriented culture incoming students are likely to be accustomed to. The orientation will also support students in making the adjustment to professional school, which lacks sports games and other activities that help build communities in college.

“How do we facilitate activities that foster that sense of belonging?” said Black. “How a student thrives within our program is very much connected to how they are connected within the community. These things are so central to student success.”

Also central to student support, and to increasing enrollment, is financial support. Through KU Endowment, the school raised more money in a single year than it ever has in 2025: almost $7.2 million, including a $1.6 million grant from the Bedford Falls Foundation that will fund need-based scholarships to approximately 170 BSN students over four years. Three-quarters of BSN students at KU have demonstrated financial need, noted Giddens.

Supporting faculty is critical also. The school’s new faculty practice plan will enable faculty to be in clinical practice, in many healthcare settings as part of their faculty job. This both allows faculty to practice their craft as they teach and helps support the school financially.

A commitment to the entire state

These arrangements, which provide clinical sites with the expertise of nursing faculty, will also support the mission of the Kansas Nursing Workforce Center, established in 2023 at KU School of Nursing to address the shortage of nurses in the state.

The center gathers accurate and timely data and information about nursing from credible source and makes it accessible and actionable for decision-makers in the state, including legislators, educators and healthcare employers, as well as people interested in entering the profession, said Barbara MacArthur, MN, FAAN, clinical assistant professor at KU School of Nursing and director of the center. 

In September 2025, the center released its second State of Nursing in Kansas report. Compiled from 25 sources that include state and national databases and surveys, the comprehensive report includes over 84 pages of charts and information about the supply and characteristics of Kansas’s nursing workforce trends over 10 years, 2015 to 2025. The data compares the Kansas workforce to the national nursing workforce for Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs), Registered Nurses (RNs) and Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs).

“We look at the data from different vantage points. We look at the demographics of nurses: Who are they? How were they educated? How old are they? In what setting do they practice? We look at the geographic and population data: Where are nurses located and practicing across the state?” said MacArthur. “Our focus is on measuring and reporting what matters to contribute to programs that support the nursing workforce and improve access and health outcomes for Kansans.

The report showed that the number of nurses in Kansas is declining, with approximately one-quarter of RNs and LPNs planning to retire or leave the profession within five years. And in January 2026, the center released an advance report on the state of nursing education in Kansas that showed that despite a 12% increase in seats available in prelicensure nursing programs at Kansas Board of Regents schools, the number of nursing students enrolled has declined overall.

The center collaborates with communities and organizations to foster a shared understanding of the nursing workforce. MacArthur remembers a request the center got about a county public health clinic that provided perinatal care to many patients and had a shortage of nurses. The county was concerned about the impact the shortage would have on mothers and babies, and they wanted advice on how to attract nurses and what kinds of nurses to recruit. In the end, using data from KU’s report, the county commission decided to utilize public monies to help recruit neonatal or perinatal nurses for the community clinic, MacArthur said.

The center also received a $1 million grant from the Kansas Board of Regents to lead a project with three aims designed to increase interest in nursing and boost applications to nursing schools throughout the state. These aims include a pilot for a centralized application for potential students to use as they apply to more than one nursing school and building a web-based tool, kansasnursingschools.com, to show potential students the education pathway options for a career in nursing.

“We’re available to help the decision makers, and we are focusing on how we’re actually going to increase the number of nurses in the state of Kansas,” said MacArthur.

New mission

Meanwhile, the school continues to revise itself. Last year, it created new mission and vision statements grounded in the idea that everything the school does is in the service of Kansans. It is currently working on developing a new strategic plan framework upon which to develop yearly goals.

“This is the work of the faculty and the staff,” said Giddens. “I happen to be the orchestrator, but they’re doing the work.”