by Donna Lampkin Stephens
Mike Kemp photo

When she was 5, Susan Gatto wanted to be a nurse, a teacher and a go-go dancer.

Looking back now, she said, two out of three aren’t bad.

Gatto, 56, is the director of the University of Central Arkansas School of Nursing.

“My dolls had pinholes all over them, and toilet paper casts,” she said, remembering her childhood and chuckling. “I was called to be a nurse. I did love teaching a lot. When I came back to school, I loved teaching my patients. 

“When I got the opportunity to teach, I thought, ‘I’m home. This is what I was called to be.’”

GROWING UP

Gatto grew up a farmer’s daughter on a Midwest family farm in Central Illinois.

“Family was very important to me,” she said. “We had extended family all around, and holidays and birthdays were very special to all of us. Our family didn’t disperse much until my brother and I went to college.”

Her father told them later if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t send the pair to college so they would stay close to home.

She went on to Millikin University in Decatur, about 30 minutes from home, where she pursued her dream of becoming a nurse and met a young man from Chicago. The college sweethearts married, and after a year during which Ron worked in sales and she worked the night shift on the orthopedic floor, they decided to move to Arkansas.

“He was an inner-city Italian kid from the south side of Chicago,” she said. “His mother was raised in Arkansas, and he loved it. Every year, they’d load up and come and visit the old folks, and he thought Arkansas was the most beautiful place ever.

“He said, ‘We don’t have kids; let’s just move.’ I didn’t even know where it was. I had to look at a map. But we packed up and moved.”

They lived in Benton for a while, near his extended family, and she worked at St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center.

After a while, she gave him a choice.

“I told him, ‘I either want a baby or I want to go back to school,’” she remembered. “He said, ‘School sounds good.’”

So she came to UCA and earned her master of science in nursing degree in the nurse educator with a clinical specialty track while working the weekend option in neurology, nephrology and urology at St. Vincent.

As she was finishing her degree, UCA offered her a job as a clinical instructor of nursing in 1989.

“When I first started here, I taught pediatrics, which is hilarious because I’ve never worked in pediatrics a day in my life,” she said. “I taught fundamentals and loved it. I worked just about every class we have in the undergrad program. I loved it.”

After finishing her master’s, she and Ron, an independent insurance agent, had daughters Morgan and Erin. In 2005, with the girls in high school and Gatto having taken on the position of director of the undergraduate program within what was then the UCA Department of Nursing, she started working on her Ph.D. in nursing at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. 

Her first dissertation project was about connectedness through the internet of elderly home-bound patients.

“I had it almost finished, but I hated it so bad I couldn’t finish it,” she said. “So I dumped my committee, got a new topic and finished in 10 months.”

Her second topic idea was study strategies of at-risk nursing students.

“It was either that or be ABD (All But Dissertation), and that wasn’t going to happen,” said Gatto, who became Dr. Gatto five days before turning 49.

The department became the School of Nursing, and after the retirement of chair Dr. Barbara Williams, Gatto became the school’s first director.

She was named Arkansas’s Nurse Educator of the Year in 2018.

Gatto “has literally helped to prepare over 1,000 nurses who practice and contribute to shaping healthcare in the state of Arkansas,” according to a nomination letter published in the Arkansas State Board of Nursing’s April/May magazine. “Her consistent investment in nursing students across the years and her dedication to creating a conducive environment for students is unmatched.”

NURSING CHALLENGES

Among the field’s biggest challenges today are shortages of nurses and nursing educators. Gatto said in recent years more than 56,000 qualified applicants were turned away from the country’s nursing programs, in part because of the shortage of faculty.

She said the Institute of Medicine in 2010 called for an increase in the number of bachelor of science in nursing graduates to 80 percent nationwide.

“A higher-educated workforce decreases mortality, morbidity and readmission rates and also decreases the failure-to-rescue rates,” she said. “Right now, Arkansas is about 42 to 46 (percent). We’re not going to make it (to 80 percent) by the 2020 deadline, but in the past six to eight years, we’ve increased it by more than 10 percent, so I think that’s a really great jump.”

UCA’s School of Nursing has played a big role in the state’s increases. Among its offerings are an RN-to-BSN completion program that is completely online. Gatto said enrollment has gone from a handful of students to almost 40.

UCA’s other degree programs, which enroll more than 400 students, include a pre-licensure BSN, three tracks in the master of science in nursing (Nurse Practitioner, Clinical Nurse Leader and Nurse Educator with a Clinical Specialty) and two entries into the doctor of nursing practice degree (BSN to DNP and a post-master’s DNP).

Gatto believes a new nursing building will be completed at UCA before she retires.

“I’m very, very optimistically positive about that,” she said. “UCA has asked the School of Nursing to expand, and we have revised our curriculum in all of our programs in order to prepare for this expansion. Some of the revisions will help us to use our resources better and more efficiently, and then having the additional classroom and clinical simulation resources on campus will help us expand to meet those needs.”

CONWAY REGIONAL PARTNERSHIP

Another UCA strategy to address the nursing shortages is a recent partnership with the Conway Regional Health System, in which the Conway Regional Health Foundation is providing $390,000 to UCA ($240,000 for scholarships and $150,000 for faculty development and School of Nursing initiatives).

“We got to talking to them about how we can help each other,” Gatto said. “Students will get $2,500 per semester for four semesters, and in return, they will sign a promissory note and agree to work with Conway Regional for 24 months following graduation.”

For its part, UCA is giving access to Torreyson Library to Conway Regional as the two partner on research.

In her move to administration, Gatto leads a faculty of 23 and staff of seven. She said she has enjoyed it.

“It’s given me opportunities to be more of a player in making these changes,” she said. “There’s one negative out of all the 100 positives — I don’t know the students as well as I used to. That’s something I really had to think about before I took this job. That was very important to me.

“I may not know all the students by name anymore, but they know who I am, and I think that’s important. I make sure they see me, and I try to guest-lecture. That’s important.”’

REWARDING CAREER

She said she loved being the director of the school.

“It’s very rewarding,” she said. “I love working with faculty and staff and students and the administration. We’re very supported, and that’s a great feeling.

“Oh my gosh, it’s so exciting right now because of all the changes that are happening and changes we’ve made in the school. The energy is just palpable.”

Hers is, too.