In 1927 a contract between the Extension Division of the University of Utah and the William H. Grover Latter-day Saints Hospital noted that the University faculty would provide six courses in the basic nursing curriculum. Students would receive credit for coursework under the Extension Division of the School of Education. This contract with the University was also extended to the Salt Lake County General Hospital School of Nursing in 1934. At the time, however, coursework from the Extension Division of the University was perceived to be of less rigor and therefore its academic credit inferior to resident credit courses at the University. This determination came in part because the 1923 Goldmark Report on Nursing had recommended Nursing Training Programs be in university settings with academic standards. Therefore, beginning in 1934 the students from these two hospital-based schools who came to campus for classes were given resident status for the courses taken there. A few years later a 1938 survey of nurse training in Utah would indicate that a Department of Nursing was a genuine need and with government funding the University of Utah made it a reality.

The Department of Nursing within the School of Education

In 1938 the Utah State Organization for Public Health Nursing and the Utah State League for Nursing Education requested a survey be conducted to evaluate whether a university school of nursing would be possible and perhaps advisable in Utah. Representatives from four national nursing organizations plus a survey director conducted the survey and reported that the need did exist, with the caveat that the basic university-based education program be firmly established with training at medical facilities for students to attain a greater degree of nursing proficiency. In 1941 Congress allotted money for nursing education to be distributed through the United States Public Health Service. With information from the 1938 survey of Utah’s needs, the University of Utah applied for and received one of the first federal funding grants for faculty salaries, equipment, and student scholarships. The University hired Phoebe Miller Kandel, author of Hospital Economics for Nurses (Harper & Brothers, 1930), as Professor of Nursing Education and its Director from 1941 to 1943. (https://library.med.utah.edu/publishing/exhibition/college-of-nursing-75th-anniversary/ )

In January 1942, because it had coordinated some of the courses offered to the hospital-based Nurse Training Schools, the School of Education was chosen to house a new Department of Nursing, with Hazelle Macquin as Chair and with an expectation that within five years Nursing could become a separate professional school independent of the School of Education. Hazelle Macquin, later to become the first dean of the College of Nursing, was an outstanding choice. Of importance to her new role, her nursing education had been in a university. She had received her bachelor’s in nursing from the University of Cincinnati in 1925 and a master’s from Columbia University in 1941. An experienced nurse, during World Wars I and II she had worked in the Red Cross in the United States and France. (https://www.deseret.com/1989/12/21/18837631/hazelle-macquin-1st-nursing-dean-at-u-dies-at-91)

Three different programs were offered through the newly organized Department of Nursing. One was a three-year diploma program that supported the four Salt Lake hospital schools. These hospital-based nursing students received a certificate of completion from the University. Second, students who completed a three-year hospital nursing program could take an additional year at the University and get a bachelor’s degree. Third, a Bachelor of Science degree would, of course, also be awarded to students in the University’s four-year basic nursing program. When the Bolton Act passed in 1943, the University of Utah Department of Nursing Education admitted over 300 students who were members of the United States Cadet Nurse Corps. Most were in the three-year diploma program. (For details of Bolton Act see Part II above.)

Achieving Independence: University of Utah College of Nursing

In the 1930s, as previously mentioned under “Advances in Nursing Education and Accreditation” above, Esther Lucile Brown, a sociologist working for the Russell Sage Foundation was asked to study several of the medical professions. After World Ward II she was asked to focus her investigations on nursing and make recommendations for the future of nursing as a profession. Her report was made public in 1948. Often called “The Brown Report,” its official name was Nursing for the Future. Among other suggestions, her report advised with convincing facts and argument that nurses should be educated in institutions of higher learning. This advice laid the groundwork for university colleges of nursing to become not only a reality but the standard path to a profession as a registered nurse.

Utah didn’t wait to read the 1948 report; nursing education was already well on its way. The Department of Nursing became the College of Nursing, an independent entity at last, at the University of Utah in 1948, and a decision was made to admit only students interested in the four-year bachelor’s degree program. However, the College continued to offer a program for graduate nurses (nurses who graduated from three-year programs) who wanted to get advanced knowledge in nursing education. Hazelle Macquin, who had been chairing the Department of Nursing, became the first Dean of the College of Nursing. A. Ray Olpin, who was President of the University from 1946 to 1964, energetically supported the birth and development of the College of Nursing. Federal funding for nursing education was also a draw for Administration to be supportive.

Six years later, in 1954, Mildred Quinn, who was then an assistant professor, became the second Dean of the College of Nursing. Her background in nursing and as an educator was extensive. Quinn graduated from the Salt Lake County Hospital Nurse Training School in 1932 and received advanced training in nurse midwifery from the University of Oregon. She worked as a staff nurse and supervisor at the University of Utah Medical School for eleven years, from 1932 to 1943, serving the last two of those years for the State Department of Public Health as well. In 1945 after she finished a college course in nursing, the teacher Phoebe Kandel, who had been the University’s Director of Nursing Education, recommended her for a faculty position to integrate public health nursing into the nursing curriculum. So, from 1945 to 1950 Quinn taught nursing courses as an Instructor in the College of Nursing while continuing to take classes herself. Although she was a faculty member, she needed a baccalaureate degree to continue teaching, so she concurrently taught in the nursing program while getting her bachelor’s, which she completed in 1946, and then her master’s degree in education in 1950. She would serve as Dean of the College of Nursing from 1954 to 1973. (Quinn, Mildred D., Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library. https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6sr28kx)

One of Mildred Quinn’s early achievements as dean was in the realm of graduate education. Early discussion of graduate education (beyond the baccalaureate degree) had been initiated when the College was established in 1948. However, no resources were available to take on that effort until the College of Nursing under Dean Macquin and then Mildred Quinn actively sought national accreditation, which was received in 1955.

In 1956, Esther Garrison from the National Institute of Mental Health, Division of Nurse Training, consulted with Dean Quinn and the nursing faculty at the University of Utah. Federal funding had become available to increase the quality of care provided to people with mental illness and Garrison had noted the commendable pass rate of Utah nurses on the psychiatric portion of the State Board exams. No doubt with Garrison’s encouragement, in the following academic year (1956-57) Dean Quinn on behalf of the College of Nursing submitted two applications for grants: one was to integrate psychiatric nursing theory and practice into the baccalaureate nursing program, and the second requested funding to start a graduate program in psychiatric nursing leading to a Master of Science degree. Both grants were approved, and money to launch these programs became available beginning in the 1957-58 academic year.