<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2g2UfS_1H5CR0q500" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2g2UfS_1H5CR0q500" width="670" height="377" ><figcaption>Western Nevada College’s Bently Hall in Minden. Courtesy</figcaption></figure>Western Nevada College is expanding the capacity of its nursing education program to address rural healthcare shortages by renovating satellite campuses in Fallon and Minden.The expansion of the Churchill County campus will triple student capacity after renovations are complete at the 7,600-square-foot Pinyon Building on Campus Way. As it scales, the expansion will be able to support 24 first-year students, 24 second-year students, 32 nursing assistants, 28 phlebotomy students, and 28 EMTs. Prior to the expansion, WNC could only accommodate eight students in the small academic skills center that had been converted into a makeshift nursing training center.“It was a little bit tight, but it was OK for eight students,” WNC President Kyle Dalpe said. “But I mean we've always kind of wondered where we are going to put (additional students), so we leveraged some money to put the entire nursing program into the Pinion Building, along with other allied health programs, and expand it and scale it up in three to five years.”Core Construction is the general contractor on the project designed by OneStudio D+A. Classes are expected to begin in spring, Dalpe said. The Fallon project relies largely on a federal directed appropriation that had to be spent by the end of the federal fiscal year. It also includes $1.2 million in private funding from the Pennington Family Foundation and the E.L. Cord Foundation.The Fallon campus has long been a hub for more distant rural areas, including all parts of Churchill and Lyon counties and even Hawthorne in Mineral County. Nursing students will rotate through various clinical settings, including Banner Health in Fallon and Renown Health in Reno to gain hands-on medical experience, Dalpe said.Receiving education in Fallon will likely lead to a higher number of nursing students staying in their home communities, he added.“Our hope is that with more seats in the rural community to serve these students, more of them will opt to stay in the communities where they were born and live, and then they’ll give back to those communities,” Dalpe said.The Douglas nursing expansion in Minden focuses on renovating underutilized facilities in the Carson Valley to provide additional nursing education opportunities for students primarily in the Douglas County area. The program will initially host eight first-year nursing students, with plans to scale up to 16 students per year.The project received a $4.4 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration, along with an additional $1.6 million from the Pennington Family Foundation. Plenium Builders is the general contractor, with JKAE handling architecture and design. Renovations are slated for completion by September, with classes starting in spring 2028.The expanded space will feature modern nursing education equipment, including advanced simulation laboratories that are designed to replicate real-world acute and long-term health care environments, as well as clinical training areas, dedicated testing space, technology upgrades and new instructional equipment.The expansion was put into play in part after administrators noticed a large contingent of students making the trip from Carson Valley to the main WNC campus in north Carson City.“When we did our research, we noticed there were 19 students from Carson Valley coming up for the Carson nursing program,” Dalpe told NNBW. “We will put a cohort in a campus that's being underutilized.“In Fallon, we're moving them into their own building, which has way more capacity than where they are now. If we scale it up there and we scale up here, then naturally some of the students who were coming to Carson would want to stay in their home communities. That would also free up seats in Carson for more localized students.”Dalpe noted that expanding student capacity in all directions is a natural progression for the public community college and eases the path to education for students who have been commuting longer distances, much like Truckee Meadows Community College and University of Nevada, Reno have done with additional campus locations.“It is natural to grow beyond our service area and further out into rural areas to serve those communities,” he said. “We're pushing out into rural communities to serve people so they don't have to do the work from a distance so they can get through the programs, and then they also will stay in those communities that they originate from and serve those populations.”The Fallon campus, which formerly relied on traveling faculty and video instruction, will have dedicated staff in place, Dalpe noted. The new program on the Douglas campus will be staffed through a mix of dedicated staff and instructors traveling south from WNC’s main Carson City campus.“Western Nevada College, along with all of the other NSHE institutions, are trying to meet the need to push nurses out into the workforce,” Dalpe said. “We are doing that by increasing capacity in rural communities where they live and now can train and then can work in order to support those communities, many of which are growing at a pretty rapid clip.”</div></body>

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Western Nevada College is expanding the capacity of its nursing education program to address rural healthcare shortages by renovating satellite campuses in Fallon and Minden. The expansion of the Churchill County campus will triple student capacity after renovations are complete at the 7,600-square-foot Pinyon Building on Campus Way. As it scales, the expansion will be able to support 24 first-year students, 24 second-year students, 32 nursing assistants, 28 phlebotomy students, and 28 EMTs. Prior to the expansion, WNC could only accommodate eight students in the small academic skills center that had been converted into a makeshift nursing training center.

Western Nevada College expanding rural nursing program

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Western Nevada College is expanding the capacity of its nursing education program to address rural healthcare shortages by renovating satellite campuses in

Western Nevada College expanding rural nursing program

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