After several years working in the Denver office of the American Lung Association, Claire Rutherford wanted work that was more hands-on. When she heard about Metro State’s new Accelerated Nursing Program (ANP), she thought it was too good to be true—that she could earn a BS in nursing in a little more than one year.

Last Saturday, Rutherford, 29, along with 29 fellow graduates, accepted their degrees as the Accelerated Nursing Program’s inaugural class of 2005.

Modeled after Johns Hopkins’ successful accelerated program, Metro’s 13-month intense curriculum gives students with non-nursing bachelor’s degrees the chance to earn a BS in nursing and prepares them to sit for the RN licensure examination. In addition to classroom study, students gain skills in a state-of-the-art instructional laboratory and spend hundreds of hours doing supervised patient care.

“The accelerated nursing program uses the same number of classroom hours as a standard program,” explains Nancy Kiernan Case, who chairs Metro’s Department of Nursing. “People ask, how can you learn everything in so short a time? We eliminate the vacations. And they work very hard.”

The program was launched to help address the nursing shortage by bringing highly educated professionals into the healthcare system efficiently. According to projections by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 1 million additional registered nurses will be needed by 2012. Metro’s Accelerated Nursing Program joins three others in the state at Regis University, the University of Northern Colorado and the University of Colorado.

The initial offering of the program attracted people from a variety of occupations, including a forest fire fighter, a flight attendant, a phlebotomist, and Rutherford, who has a degree in economics from Syracuse University and did patient education and accounting for the lung association. The median age of the accelerated nursing graduates is 29 and more than a third originally majored in biology.

ANP’s second cohort is set to start this April with 32 students accepted from a pool of 131 applicants.

“Because of the caliber of students we are accepting into this program,” Case explains, “I anticipate that a high percentage will end up in leadership roles in the nursing field.”

The program was started with funds from the Saint Joseph Hospital Foundation, Colorado Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser Permanente and Exempla Healthcare. The Colorado Trust and Caring for Colorado also provided funds for the program’s first year.

“I’ve gotten a great education,” Rutherford says. “It’s amazing what you can learn in one year. Even as I’m studying for the state boards, I find I know the material. I feel prepared.”