Changes to different nursing programs, the replacement of two classes and a revised course and major were proposed and approved at the Council on Academic Affairs’ last meeting of the semester on Thursday.

A new course titled Public Health Nursing was added to take the place of the Nursing in the Community course.

The number of credits for this new course will be reduced from the six credits contained in the Nursing Community course to three credits and will include no prerequisite class.

The new course will include a choice of three courses based out of health promotion that will compliment this new course and will require each student to pick one of the three to take.

The Leadership and Management in Nursing program was also updated and reduced to three credit hours, with students needing to take a paired course in the organizational and professional development department.

Both of these course updates have to do with a shift nursing is making to a seven-week course schedule in an effort to allow students to take more courses a semester.

It was also proposed to replace what is currently Pathophysiology and Pharmacology in Professional Nursing Practice with a new course called Pharmacogenomics in Nursing Practice.

This new course would focus more on how human genomes interact with pharmaceutical drugs and the symptoms that might arise from them as opposed to the more general pharmacology course that is currently being offered.

The new schedule and the courses affected by it were all passed by the CAA but will not be functional until 2019.

Nursing professor Renee Kidd-Marshall said the schedule and course changes will hopefully allow Eastern to turn out higher quality nursing students.

“I think we’ll have a stronger student, a stronger nurse in the workforce and, definitely, a more experienced graduate,” Kidd-Marshall said.

A health communications minor, with the health communications major just recently being added, was also updated at the meeting; health communications coordinator Elizabeth Gills said the minor had not been updated for eight to 10 years.

The biology department added a new course titled Evolutionary Medicine that will be available for biological sciences majors, which biological sciences professor Ann Fritz said is an area of interest for many students.

“There is a real connection that people feel to taking evolution and applying it in terms of human health,” Fritz said.

The rural studies minor was also updated to change the U.S. rural history course from a core course to an elective, due to the leaving of the faculty member who routinely taught the course.

A proposal on streamlining the process of changing majors was brought up, with many members agreeing that the process needs to be made easier for students.

Provost Jay Gatrell worried that making this process easier, while not making it all online, would just postpone a greater discussion involved parties need to have over how to make the process paperless and more easily available for online students.

Right now the process includes physically walking a folder from the old advisor to the new one.

All proposals passed unanimously, and the discussion of an online paperless way to change majors is expected to be continued outside the CAA.

Brooke Schwartz can be reached at 581-2812 or at bsschwartz@eiu.edu.