Ellington

Being No. 1 doesn’t mean everything’s perfect, and the UW School of Nursing had to learn that the hard way.

In light of budget cuts that the nursing school will face during the next year, the school contracted MacDonald Boyd & Associates to assess the school’s performance in March. The resulting report, which came out in June, said the school needed to improve its business model, teaching and learning mode, clarity of leadership and morale.

“[The] past three years has presented unprecedented challenges for the [School of Nursing] due to a series of dramatic budget reductions occurring simultaneously with a change in leadership,” the report said.

Marla Salmon, dean of the School of Nursing, said that the school had never assessed itself as a whole before this report.

“When things go really well, it’s hard to see any problems,” Salmon said. “In some ways, I see it as us ahead of the curve. Rather than continuing to fix things on a patchwork basis, we took a look at how the school was working as a whole.”

The results the consultants found were shocking to some faculty and staff.

“It was fairly devastating to some faculty,” Josephine Ensign, a professor in the school, said. “I think they didn’t realize that it would be so negative. It was overwhelming.”

Salmon said that it was difficult, but necessary to hear the findings of the report.

“It’s always difficult to, in one big dollop, hear criticism,” Salmon said. “It’s easy to focus on the challenges.”

According to the report, the school needs to address barriers of multiple levels of leadership.

“Our school of nursing was the most hierarchical they’d seen,” Ensign said. “We were overboard on hierarchy. That made it cumbersome for them to tease out what was going on.”

The consultants’ findings weren’t a surprise to Ensign and some of her colleagues, she said.

“A lot of what has gotten us into this pickle is a lack of clear leadership,” Ensign said. “Yes, there have been some significant budget challenges that are outside of our control, but leadership has not been clear and contentious. … It still is unclear how our school is going to be led this year.”

Salmon, who has been dean since 2008, announced her resignation prior to the report’s results in May and will only remain in her position until June 2012. She will remain a faculty member at the UW, where she says she can focus on global and public health issues, the reason she says she first came to the university.

“I’m not doing what I came to do,” Salmon said. “[However] I’m in the most uniquely ideal position. I’m committed to improving the future of the school. … I can be more of a midwife in the process.”

Ruth Johnston, associate vice president of finance and facilities, said that the consultants tackled the job on a short timeline, so the results weren’t extremely specific.

“They did a pretty broad brush in a short amount of time to uncover the big issues,” Johnston said. “I think they did a good job of identifying what needs to be addressed.”

Johnston said that the consultant’s timeline was short because the School of Nursing wanted the results by the end of the academic year.

The report said that the school needed to “articulate a vision of an inspiring, hopeful future for the school as a whole.”

The school will be looking at cutting specialties and working on collaborative programs, including a doctoral program with Washington State University.

“We will be smaller,” Salmon said. “We will be more strategic and we will be stronger. We will be deliberate in our use of resources. I will not have lost sight of excellence and commitment to serve the state.”

Johnston will be spending 75 percent of her time next year working on the school’s restructure as a special assistant to the provost. There is a strategic plan in place, and workgroups will include faculty on future decisions.

“The faculty of the school is going to be integrally involved with all of these work groups,” Johnston said. “We’re getting geared up to work on it.”

She said there’s a lot of work to do and it’s key to create a sustainable academic business plan.

“Anything around aligning the curriculum to the budget is absolutely critical,” Johnston said. “The school has to be able to afford what it wants to do.”

Although budget cuts will be plaguing all the departments at the UW in the next year, Salmon said that she thought the nursing school’s rank and reputation are helping it to bear a little less of the burden.

“We are a point of great distinction and well-deserved pride in the university,” Salmon said. “You invest in those programs and schools that make you proud.”

Salmon said that students continue to be at the center of the school’s concerns for the future. She said that the assessment was a difficult but necessary process.

“What we did is what is done in nursing and healthcare everyday,” Salmon said. “We did an assessment and decided what needed to be done to make improvements.”

Reach reporter Sarah Schweppe at news@dailyuw.com.