UW School of Nursing Gets $1 Million Donation

Nurses and area nurses with the Wyoming Medical Center in Casper will soon have the opportunity to advance their degrees in nursing, thanks to a $1 million donation to the Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing at the University of Wyoming.

The donation, made by the McMurry Foundation, will increase the opportunities for nurses to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher, and it also will extend that opportunity to those with bachelor’s degrees in other fields who wish to earn a nursing degree from UW.

Susie McMurry of the McMurry Foundation, said about the opportunity to make the donation:

This scholarship will serve to strengthen the efforts of UW and WMC through opportunity and through achievement, which will be measured by the pride these future graduates feel, and by the pride their families feel in them.”

For years, UW and WMC (one of the state’s largest hospitals) have collaborated to increase educational opportunities for nurses in Wyoming. As the decade moved to a close in 2010, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies released nursing goals for 2020, goals that included the increase of BSN-prepared nurses to 80 percent. This goal emerged out of research demonstrating that patients have better clinical outcomes when their nurses hold higher educational degrees. The two organizations are grateful for the generous donation; a scholarship dedicated solely for the educational advancement of nursing will better position Wyoming to meet that goal.