ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606240068
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLYSTAFF WRITER
NOTE: Above
LISA Kormann enrolled at Roanoke's College of Health Sciences because she could stay home with her family and keep her job while she upgraded her nursing skills.
Married and the mother of two small children, she juggled 30 hours of work and a full class load for two years to graduate last month with a degree in nursing.
Kormann, who has worked as a licensed practical nurse at Lewis-Gale Hospital in Salem for 11 years, is still at Lewis-Gale. But now as a registered nurse, she has more responsibility and makes more money.
"I needed to further my education to have job security," Kormann said.
But the 14-year-old college now faces security problems of its own.
The College of Health Sciences has almost 600 students in occupational and physical therapy, paramedicine, health information management and two-and four-year nursing programs. Most of the students come from the Roanoke Valley and Western Virginia.
The college gets about $350,000 of its $3 million operating budget from Carilion Community Hospital. The remainder comes from tuition and grants.
The hospital subsidy stops in May 1997, but Carilion has said the college can continue to occupy quarters on the downtown Roanoke hospital grounds at no charge for as long as it wants.
With that commitment and $950,000 in transition money the General Assembly allocated to the college in January, college President Harry Nickens said, it appeared the changeover from hospital division to independent college would be almost painless. Nickens has been working on plans to build a new facility for the college when it grows to about 800 students, which he expects to happen in six years. He already has gotten American Electric Power Co. to donate land near Interstate 81 in the Dixie Caverns area of Roanoke County.
But Nickens got hit with a whammy in April when Gov. George Allen vetoed the state subsidy for the college's transition period. Shortly afterward, there was a $57,000 cut for next year in one of its federal grants. Short-term survival became more of a focus than long-term growth.
The College of Health Sciences must live on a tighter budget and make tough choices about which courses it will offer, Nickens said. No one got salary increases; vacant positions are not being filled.
College officials say it was inevitable and desirable for the school to be forced to become independent of its hospital parent. The process has just been speeded up.
"We are going to make it, but it will be on perseverance" Nickens said. "Our goal is to remain the institution of choice for health careers in the western part of Virginia."
Nickens came to the college in 1989 with the purpose of building it into an accredited institution in which the money coming in equaled what's going out. The college didn't have to mind its budget as much while the hospital was there to gird it up, Nickens said.
The college started in 1982 as a substitute for Community's diploma nursing program. Diploma programs had lost favor because the course work would not transfer when a graduate wanted to pursue a four-year degree at another school. College of Health Sciences courses are transferable.
Nickens said he has met or has the structure in place to meet most of his goals for an independent institution. The exception is the computer system that the federal grant cut has eliminated.
A physician assistant program is scheduled to begin in fall 1997. All full-time staff have master's degrees.
Most important, the college has the four-year nursing program. Nickens considered baccalaureate status to be central to the school's survival.
"A two-year college, unknown and with a narrow focus, is going to have a hard time," he said.
The college intends to take on even more of the trappings of a four-year facility. Last week, it expanded the board and named new members, Carilion Health System chief executive officer Tom Robertson among them. Carilion owns or operates 14 hospitals, among them Community and Carilion Roanoke Memorial hospitals in Roanoke.
Robertson replaces several Carilion employees who had been on the board.
"Based on the critical decisions that will have to be made, I thought I should be involved," he said. Robertson said Carilion is interested in keeping the college alive because it produces graduates that "this end of the state needs."
"Nickens and that board have pretty grand ambitions for the college, and I commend them for that," he said.
The new board needs to play a different role from the old one, Nickens said. For one thing, it will have to raise money.
A new campus is just a dream right now, said Frank Flippin, a lawyer who is chairman of the school's board. No one has worked out the nuts and bolts of how it can be achieved and how much it will cost.
The college board wants to look at all options, Flippin said, including the possibility of finding a new relationship or sponsor. If the right partnership offer came along, it would be considered, he said. "We're looking at what's good for the school."
When Carilion decided the college needed to spin off on its own, it invited area colleges to make a proposal to partner with the facility. Several replied.
Virginia Western Community College, where Nickens used to work, offered to take over the school. It said it could save money by merging the health college's administrative duties with its own. It also pledged that current students could complete their courses.
That would have taken about two years, and Virginia Western would study the school's future during that time, said Charles Downs, Virginia Western president.
The offer was refused. Nickens said it was a better deal for Virginia Western than for the College of Health Sciences. The takeover would have expanded the community college's offerings, but he feared it would reduce courses at the College of Health Sciences and lead to its closing. The colleges don't duplicate health science course offerings except for nursing, and the community college program has a waiting list for that.
However, Virginia Western will reconsider its offer, Downs said this month.
Radford University also studied the college extensively, but never made an offer, said Charles Owens, Radford vice president for academic affairs.
Because Radford is a four-year institution, it would not have been able to offer certificate and two-year programs, which make up the bulk of the health sciences courses. The programs would have had to be converted to four-year degree programs.
The logistics and the finances just didn't work for Radford, Owens said.
He said one thing Radford considered in its study was what role Virginia Western could play in providing the general education courses now taught at the College of Health Sciences. It reached no conclusion on that because Radford decided it would not pursue a relationship with the College of Health Sciences.
"The real problem was financial, whether it was financially viable for us to take on a new responsibility," Owens said. "We recognized the value of those programs in general and particularly in the Roanoke Valley."
The College of Health Sciences "goes unrecognized," said board Chairman Flippin, who cites the success its students have in finding jobs as evidence of its value. Because it has operated as part of a hospital, he doesn't think the community appreciates the economic impact the college has on the area by bringing students to town to live and study and by training them for jobs that have above-average starting salaries.
One of the college's commitments is to provide trained health care professionals for Southwest Virginia communities that are federally designated as medically underserved because of the shortage of workers.
In 1995, the college got a $352,847 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to cross-train nursing students in occupational therapy, physical therapy and respiratory care. One-half of the students accepted into the physician's assistant program must be from Southwest Virginia.
The average age of the College of Health Sciences student is 29. Many are back in school to retrain for a new profession. Some have recently come from four-year degree programs that didn't provide the career base they wanted.
Eric Lovern, 31, commutes an hour each way four times weekly to take physical therapy assistant classes that he hopes will "get me out of factory work."
Lovern lives in Draper and already has an associate degree from Wytheville Community College.
Physical therapy assistant graduates can expect starting salaries of $26,000 to $30,000 and are especially needed in rural areas, instructor Rebecca Duff said.
The need to supply health care workers to rural areas is so great that four years ago, the University of Virginia started a four-year nursing program at its Clinch Valley College. It graduated seven students this spring, said Betty Johnson, director of nursing.
The area has a large number of nurses with associate degrees who are potential students for the four-year program, but could only go back to school if they could also continue working, she said.
"Over 95 percent of nurses are women," she said. "We don't have people picking up and moving [to go to school], especially if they have real small children."
Clinch Valley will start a nursing program in Abingdon this fall, but Johnson doesn't see it as competition for the Roanoke college.
There are 2.4 million registered nurses in the country, and it takes a lot of schools to maintain that work force, she said. Also, "assistant" professionals in occupational and physical therapies are in great demand. Regulations allow several assistants to work under one physical therapist.
Most health sciences programs have waiting lists in that program. The Roanoke college draws physical therapy assistant students from the Wytheville area because that program at Wytheville Community College has a two-to three-year waiting list. The College of Health Sciences costs more than a community college - $4,200 vs. $1,600 - but it also can have waiting lists for programs; there's one now for occupational therapy assistant.
But jobs for some health care professionals, especially nurses, aren't as plentiful as before, because of hospital downsizing.
Candice Reed, who lives in Christiansburg and just graduated from the College of Health Sciences with a degree in nursing, is still looking. She already had a degree in police science from New River Community College and was working as a dispatcher at the Blacksburg Police Department when she decided to return to school.
"When I started school, there was always a job for a nurse in the paper," Reed said.
The volatility of the health care market is a hurdle for any college offering health science courses. Duff said physical therapy assistant positions are not as plentiful in some urban areas as they used to be.
Satellite therapy assistant programs that the College of Health Sciences began in Fishersville and Lynchburg will be discontinued after this fall. When the programs were started, the students already had job contracts when they came into the program.
The communities are being saturated, Duff said.
However, Leanne Faulk, who completed the satellite occupational therapy assistant program in Lynchburg in May, found a job in her hometown of Virginia Beach within two weeks. She had three job offers, all with $30,000 to $40,000 starting pay. She also has a bachelor's degree in community health from Liberty University in Lynchburg.
Health sciences colleges once affiliated with hospitals are all using the same strategies to survive, said Marilyn Wilson, executive dean of Lutheran College of Health Professions in Fort Wayne, Ind. They are planning fund-raising campaigns, soliciting alumni, seeking grants and hoping for corporate and estate gifts to their foundations.
Wilson's college was affiliated with Lutheran Hospital of Indiana until that hospital was bought in 1995 by Quorum Health Group of Nashville, Tenn. Quorum split the hospital foundation off from the hospital and the college went with the foundation, which continues to subsidize it with about $1 million a year.
The college must become self-sufficient, though, Wilson said. It intends to launch a fund-raising campaign, tap graduates for donations and stay on top of changing health care needs in its course offerings, Wilson said.
The Lutheran college is one of nine members of the National Consortium of Health Science Colleges that Roanoke's Nickens helped to found.
Health sciences schools aren't finding life as easy as in the past, said Dr. A. Melville Lawson, dean of academic affairs at Kettering College of Medical Arts in Kettering, Ohio. Kettering is a Seventh-day Adventist institution on the campus of Kettering Medical Center and also is in the consortium. Its physician's assistant program is being looked at by the College of Health Sciences as a model.
Although still tied to the hospital, Kettering is having to watch its budget, Lawson said. It now must account for things such as copying expenses that were once lumped in with the hospital's costs.
"It's a challenge, no question," he said.
LENGTH: Long : 229 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: FILE/Staff. 1. Danielle Mason (right) practices with aby CNBcompression pump on
fellow student Sara Brown. 2. Leanne Faulk gets a cuddle from son
John Austin after May's graduation ceremony. color. KEYWORDS: PROFILE