College of Nursing & Health Care Professions

  Athletic training and nursing students in GCU’s College of Nursing and Health Care Professions recently worked alongside physical therapists, EMTs and other health care professionals to care for injuries and illnesses sustained by participants in the Wild Canyon Games near Williams, Ariz. The GCU medical team volunteers were, from left, Kellie Lotshaw, Chelsey Ybanez, Ryle Garland, Zoe Arthur, Michael McKenney, Alexandra Whitney, Brooke Sutton, Abigail Nevitt and Nick Thomas. (Photo courtesy of Michael McKenney)

Three days of commencement ceremonies at GCU ended Saturday afternoon, and there were enough cheers to fill a stadium and enough tears to use up a box of Kleenex. Amid all the emotions were more stories of grit and determination — and not just among the graduates.

By Darryl Webb GCU News Bureau  

By Janie Magruder GCU Today Magazine As a student at Canby High in northwestern Oregon, Bryce Beatty filled his days with chemistry, honors biology, advanced placement physics and playing shortstop for the baseball team. But when he came to Grand Canyon University in 2012, Beatty traded his mitt and jersey for latex gloves and an apron. For the then freshman, focusing on his major — biology with an emphasis in pre-med — required protection for his hands and clothing in GCU’s cadaver lab. Despite his considerable high school science background, Beatty knew he would need some help in chemistry as he pursued a career in spine surgery. As soon as he arrived on campus, he requested tutoring help from the Center for Learning & Advancement (CLA). Now a junior in the College of Science, Engineering and Technology, Beatty is one of GCU’s top science tutors. He helped inspire University leaders to restructure the tutoring system and is assisting with its success. There’s extra credit, of course: “If you can teach it, you know it,” he said. Narrowing the focus Tutoring has evolved over the past 18 months during a perfect storm of change at GCU. The administration wanted to boost […]

Folks in the College of Nursing and Health Care Professions have grown accustomed to Dr. Cheryl Roat’s smiling face, open door, sage advice and institutional knowledge. But after 27 years of helping bring GCU’s nursing college to prominence and nurturing its faculty, staff and students, Roat is retiring this week. GCU Today has a story about the many contributions of this regular fixture in the CONHCP and how she will be missed.

The first Senior Night at GCU was a big moment Thursday for nine students and eight faculty/staff members, who were among a crowd of 450 in the Arena. The student award recipients were selected by University leadership in the areas of academics, athletics and student affairs and for their service, faith and spirit. The faculty and staff received awards for positively impacting students.

Story by Janie Magruder Photos by Darryl Webb GCU News Bureau In the best sense of the word, Brad Scruggs, Ahmad Saleem and Brian Scruggs are taskmasters. The recent biology graduates of Grand Canyon University put medical school on hold six months ago to jump aboard an international phenomena fueled by the popularity of Uber, the mobile-app-based transportation service. They created a software application that matches people who need tasks done sooner rather than later with people who have the know-how, desire and time — now — to do them and launched Joblyt. The young entrepreneurs needed funding, and they got it Tuesday when the judges selected Joblyt the grand prize winner of the 2015 GCU Canyon Challenge, which was hosted by the Colangelo College of Business before an estimated crowd of 400 in GCU Arena. The Scruggs brothers and Saleem, instructional assistants in the College of Science, Engineering and Technology, received a $7,000 check for first place plus $4,000 more for nabbing 49 percent of the votes in a 20-hour texting campaign drawing nearly 5,200 voters. That’s 11 grand that goes, you guessed it, back into the business. “You can’t patent an idea,” Brian Scruggs said of a concept that […]

By Janie Magruder GCU News Bureau Life was too short for McKenzie Monks. A born performer, youngest child of Denise and Richard Monks and part of a mutual admiration society with her two  older siblings, McKenzie was diagnosed with kidney cancer at age 3. Despite aggressive treatments, she died before she  could get to kindergarten. “She went through so much and her life was taken far too soon,” said sister Mandy Monks, a student at Grand Canyon University. “The lessons she taught us — to always be grateful for your blessings and tell the people you love — changed our entire outlook on life. We wanted to do something to have her name live on.” Ten years ago, the family started the McKenzie Monks Foundation, which has donated $1 million to open the Kenzie Center in Phoenix Children’s Hospital’s (PCH) Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders and has given 2,000 wheeled suitcases filled with age- and gender-appropriate toys and comfort items to children diagnosed with cancer there. Called Kenzie Kases, the suitcases are patterned after McKenzie’s pink Hello Kitty bag that she took to the hospital for every treatment. The Monks plan to join an estimated 4,500 people on GCU’s main […]

Story by Janie Magruder Photos by Darryl Webb GCU Today Magazine They grew up worlds apart, one in Swaziland with missionary parents and four siblings, the other in a smaller military family that over the years lived on more than a dozen Air Force bases in the United States. Their paths to Grand Canyon University’s College of Nursing and Health Care Professions also were divergent. The science enthusiast toured GCU’s campus as a high school student, was intrigued by the cadaver lab and enrolled as a freshman, while the athlete transferred as a college senior after the future of her school’s track and field program became muddy. But once they met, Bekah Hansz and Lauren Graham discovered they had much in common. They were the same age and came to GCU from the same city, Colorado Springs. They shared career aspirations in nursing and were interested in the military, specifically, Army ROTC. And now, the two women share the honor of being named distinguished military graduates — Graham in 2013 and Hansz in 2014 — by the U.S. Army. As such, they were among the top 10 percent of cadets in their respective classes, competing not only with other students […]

By Janie Magruder GCU Today Magazine There are no tiny patients born too early for their own good, no new mothers wrung out with worry over their babies’ ragged breaths, no nurses rushing to respond to jarring alarms in Marla Booker’s new workplace. In fact, the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Sidra Medical and Research Center, which Booker has been hired to help staff and run, isn’t open yet. But there’s still plenty for this Grand Canyon University alumna to do in a place that could not be more different from where she spent her entire adult life, as a wife, mother, nurse and hospital administrator. In November, not 30 days after walking across the GCU Arena stage to accept her diploma for a master’s degree in health care administration, Booker moved 6,600 miles from her longtime home in Connecticut to Qatar, a small, oil-rich nation on the coast of the Persian Gulf. Ending a 25-year career at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford, she is helping create a state-of-the-art hospital for women and children in the capital city of Doha. It was a bold move for anyone but especially for someone who, at age 47, never had traveled […]