Nashville State Health Sciences Graduates: Making a Difference from the Classroom to Communities

The School of Health Sciences at Nashville State continues establishing itself as a premier destination for teaching and training the next generation of healthcare professionals in Middle Tennessee.

With a strong focus on hands-on learning and industry partnerships, the program is dedicated to equipping students with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in various healthcare fields.

By fostering a supportive educational environment and emphasizing real-world experience, Nashville State is preparing graduates to meet the evolving demands of the healthcare landscape.

With a new state-of-the-art facility and plans to expand programs to the Dickson and Clarksville campuses, Donna Whitehouse, dean of the School of Health Sciences, says they are here to serve.

“The School of Health Sciences sits to serve the people of Nashville and our surrounding communities,” Whitehouse said. “We are here to help Nashville be healthy and get healthy.”

“There is a great demand for people in healthcare and we are positioned to meet that need.”

As a college embedded in the community, Nashville State has made it a part of its mission to educate and train the workforce of tomorrow. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of healthcare.

“From the acute care needs in hospitals to outpatient programs, to people needing healthcare in their homes...we can turn students around in two years and sometimes less, and they can be in the workforce,” Whitehouse said.

“If you talk to any of our partners, the quality of what we produce at all of our programs is high, and they seek our graduates out in every one of our programs.”

To better serve students and the community, the School of Health Sciences recently relocated into a newly renovated building located on Nashville State’s White Bridge campus. The state-of-the-art facility is home to all the Health Sciences classrooms, labs, faculty and staff offices, and student lounges, bringing everything under one roof for the first time.

The building features dedicated spaces for each of the major programs, including labs for nursing students with patient simulation spaces and beds; four operating room suites designed as if they were in a clinical setting for the Surgical Technology and Central Sterile Processing programs; surgical tool sterilizing labs and equipment rooms, a virtual reality simulation room, Anatomage tables, and a full-scale rehabilitation unit for occupational therapy assistant training.

“It is an incredible space,” Whitehouse said.

“We are now in spaces intentionally designed for healthcare training. Our students are getting top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art training equipment to go with the most important part, which is teaching them how to think like healthcare practitioners.”

One great benefit of the new building housing all components of the Health Sciences at Nashville State is the ability for health sciences students to collaborate and work together as they would in any other medical facility.

“Students are interacting much more frequently, much like they would in a hospital setting,” Whitehouse said.

In addition to leading the transition to the new facility, Dean Whitehouse says she is focused on meeting the needs of the Health Sciences faculty and building an environment that creates lifelong learners.

“I’m here to make sure our faculty have the resources they need and be the excellent instructors they are and demonstrate to our students what it looks like to be a lifelong learner.”

Whitehouse said she is committed to fostering and increasing the number of high-quality programs they offer in a rigorous environment befitting the future healthcare jobs Nashville State students will one day fill.

“Our goal is to be an education leader for students pursuing healthcare careers. You have options when it comes to studying healthcare and we have a lot of great options here.”