VISION 2025
SCHOOL OF NURSING STRATEGIC PLAN
Letter from the Dean
Dear School of Nursing and UTMB Communities,
The University of Texas Medical Branch School of Nursing (SON) has a long-standing history of excellence and innovation in educating professional nurses for leadership roles in the state, nation, and international arenas. As the first school of nursing west of the Mississippi, UTMB's SON has been a trailblazer in nursing education for 130 years. UTMB School of Nursing was the first nursing school in the United States to become affiliated with a university, the first to establish a Master of Nursing in the state of Texas and the first in the state to offer online graduate education in nursing. With our legacy of "firsts" in mind, UTMB leaders are committed to providing the infrastructure to advance and promote the mission of the School to pave the way for generations to come.
The last few decades have provided tremendous growth for nurses and nursing education. On both the national and state levels, the nursing field will continue to face demands that will change the landscape of the health care industry familiar to us today. It will be imperative for our school to remain strategic, agile and bold as we proactively plan for these fluctuations. As an academic health care institution, we can prepare nurses to be leaders in their field, teach faculty to become inspiring educators, encourage the use of cutting-edge technology, and promote evidence-based practice through research and innovation.
A holistic view of the nursing field is necessary to understand our path forward as an institution and a community. UTMB SON suggests strategies to tackle the gaps in nursing education to help aid anticipated shortages in Texas. Along with the Strategic Plan, Vision 2025, we anticipate that improving our nursing education will in turn advance the quality and safety of patient care throughout the nation. This document serves as a planning tool, not to be mistaken for a strict road map. With this guiding document, UTMB SON aims to shed light on current issues facing nursing education and provide strategies for improvement.

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How Will This Impact You?
Take a look:
Our Process
Vision 2025 will support the mission of the university through educational excellence, impactful research, strong leadership, and intentional goals that aim to support the health and health care of Texans and diverse populations around the world. Our strategic plan will allow our work to accelerate over the next five years and ensure that we remain intentional, bold, and agile as we implement our priorities and CREATE the future for nursing excellence.
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The initial phase of our strategic planning process involved a collegial effort to bring the SON community together through a shared vision of our future. Working with our colleagues across the UTMB community, we created a strong plan for how to improve the health of Texans and diverse populations around the world through nursing education, research, leadership, service and practice. We established our new mission, vision and values that will serve our School of Nursing, UTMB, and the state of Texas, and beyond.
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Once we finalized our shared mission, vision, and values, we developed a better sense of our strengths as a community and areas of opportunity. Through internal and external environmental scans, we recognized that our Vision 2025 will provide us with momentum to capitalize on the strengths and perspectives of diverse communities to promote an inclusive culture of collaboration to meet our goals.
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Our six pillars (Culture, Research, Education, Innovation, Transformation and Engagement) have become the foundation for our future. To guarantee accountability and success, we will assess each current and new initiative to ensure alignment with our mission, vision and values. We are committed to using Vision 2025 as a roadmap, reassessing our progress over the next five years and adjusting our processes to ensure that we meet our goals.
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Our goal is to use Vision 2025 as a roadmap, to operationalize our goals together. The strategic plan is not a stagnant document, but rather a blueprint of our vision and destination. We will continue to evaluate and assess our successes and our shortcomings to establish a strong culture of accomplishments, constructive feedback, improvement, capitalizing on our strengths, and moving our school forward and contribute to health and health care in meaningful ways. We will continue to hold ourselves accountable as we lead in nursing education, conduct high-impact research, promote leadership and service, and improve the health of diverse populations around the world.
Feedback
We would like to hear from you! Please provide your feedback on our goals and provide any suggestions you have for our Vision 2025 Strategic Plan. Dean Deborah J. Jones will view the feedback provided in this short survey and address the questions, concerns and recommendations provided.
Thank you for all you do for our school!