Q&A with Dean Val Howard

Dean Val Howard has introduced a new organizational structure at Carolina Nursing, aimed at better supporting faculty, staff, and students while addressing the evolving needs of the nursing profession. This reorganization redefines departments, creates new divisions, and appoints leaders to strengthen critical areas such as faculty development, wellness, and strategic partnerships. These changes align with Carolina Nursing’s vision: to lead the profession and to improve lives for the public good. 

In this Q&A, Dean Howard shares insights into this transformation and its impact on Carolina Nursing’s mission and future. 

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What inspired the recent organizational changes?

In a word, listening. In my first year as dean, I prioritized listening to our community—faculty, staff and students—and heard two key themes emerge: 1) they wanted to maintain the excellence the School has long been known for while creating more opportunities to collaborate across academic and research programs and 2) they wanted to build a culture of greater welcome and belonging.  

At the same time, we started a new strategic planning process, incorporating insights from internal and external stakeholders. Through those insights, it became clear that to meet the resulting Plan’s goals to grow responsibly and excel both operationally and inclusively, our organizational structure and ways of working would need to be reshaped and retooled.   

I believe the resulting structure better supports our vision by fostering greater support mechanisms, communication, leadership development and collaboration across and through our programs. 

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What are the key changes in the new structure?  

To achieve this reshaping, we de-emphasized our academic programs as our primary means of organization and introduced:   

• A Division of Faculty Affairs to enhance faculty mentoring, growth, communication and professional development.   
• A Division for Wellness to focus internally on the welcome and well-being of our community and to focus externally on studying matters related to resilience, burn-out, abuse and other issues facing the nursing profession and workforce.   
• Office of Strategy and Global Affairs to strengthen the School’s strategic partnerships with health systems, our community colleges, statewide high schools and clinical preceptors, and to incorporate both local and global perspectives and opportunities into our curriculum, research and service agendas. 
• Office of Research and Scholarship to combine and streamline the School’s grant funding application and dissemination processes under a single office and provide greater supports for faculty and students seeking grant funding. 
• Key new hires, including a Transformation Manager whose role is to identify and provide solutions for areas of operational inefficiency within the School and an Assistant Dean for Innovations in Teaching and Learning who is responsible for raising the standard for cutting-edge education, clinical simulations and the incorporation of leadership development throughout our curriculum.     

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That seems like a lot of change and a lot of new positions. Was the reorganization costly? 

No, it wasn’t, actually. Among the things I’m proud of in this reorganization is that it was cost-effective and largely budget neutral. 

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What impact will the new structure have on day-to-day operations?   

The hope is that  

• our leaders are better positioned to function efficiently in the day-to-day while having an eye toward strategy and our long-term vision, creating opportunities for cross-collaboration of programs, cross-pollination of ideas, research, teaching innovations and improved operations and systems.  
• our faculty are well-supported in their teaching, research and service endeavors 
• our students have richer experiences in the clinical and classroom settings, more mentorship opportunities from faculty across our academic programs and greater support systems, from financial aid counselors to advising. 

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How will this benefit students, faculty, and the healthcare community?  

In practical terms, this structure is designed to allow us to be nimble and adaptable to the needs of our students, faculty, the profession and the workforce needs of the state. The new positions allow for more thought-leadership, problem solving and thoughtful action. The new departments and divisions allow for both greater collaboration in teaching and research, and more focused effort in such areas as establishing important partnerships with our community colleges and creating new program pathways that allow access for students from our rural communities to attend Carolina. 

At the same time, it is designed to foster a greater sense of community where students, staff and faculty know one another better, work together more often and feel supported and empowered to thrive.  

In short, the hope is it will serve as an indispensable underpinning to our goal of equipping our graduates to lead and innovate as educators, scientists, practitioner and executives, and our faculty and partnerships to address the needs of our profession, the workforce, and the health of both individual patients and our communities.   

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What’s your vision for the School’s future?  

My vision is our community’s collective vision as articulated in our strategic plan: That Carolina Nursing will lead the profession and improve lives for the public good.  

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How does this restructuring align with long-term goals?  

The entire aim of the restructuring is in service to that stated vision and our collective promise that at Carolina Nursing: 

• We will be, and prepare, exceptional nurse leaders who advance health care to improve lives. 
• We will drive the state of nursing science and translate our discoveries into better practice and systems of care. 
• We will serve the needs of our neighbors, and export our expertise to nurse educators, scientists and practitioners around the globe. 
• We will promote the profession of nursing for the greater good. 

I believe this new structure positions us well to lead in education, research, and service. 

For example, we renamed the Office of Research and Scholarship to reflect the contributions of clinical-track and fixed-term faculty, aligning with our commitment to _driving nursing science and translating discoveries into practice. This inclusive approach extends to global affairs and community partnerships, where we apply lessons learned locally to global contexts.   

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How will the new Nursing Education Building support the mission?  

Oh, tremendously, and in so many ways! And we’re so excited about it — I could go on and on. But in short, the new building will allow our world-class faculty, staff and students to work to their full potential. When you consider that we have been the top-ranked public school of nursing in the nation with what can generously be called inadequate facilities, just imagine what we will be able to make of ones that include:  

• State-of-the-art simulation spaces for immersive learning.   
• Larger classrooms with state-of-the-art technology to accommodate growing enrollment and online programs.   
• Collaborative gathering spaces to foster innovation and community.   

In short, it represents in physical form what I hope our reorganization represents: our commitment to recruit and retain brilliant, collaborative and diverse faculty and staff that will have the highest caliber resources, facilities, colleagues and technology to enjoy purposeful and long careers at Carolina Nursing — careers that are thriving, fulfilling and creative. And our commitment that our students will learn in an atmosphere of great intellectual energy and will have every tool needed, and opportunity available, to achieve their best for the profession and the populations they will serve. 

At the end of the day, every bit of the work we do at Carolina Nursing – whether in designing a new building or in designing a new organizational structure – is ultimately in service to advancing health for our loved ones, our neighbors, our colleagues, our communities – for all of us.