There is something quietly arresting about the moment: a nursing school dean, standing before an audience at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, holds up a newspaper headline from the nineteenth century. “A community suffers significant Health Inequity.” The year beneath it could belong to any era. Dean Eileen Fry-Bowers, PhD, JD, CPNP, of the School of Nursing and Health Professions at the University of San Francisco, chose that headline deliberately. Her point was not about nostalgia. It was a reckoning.
More than a century of medical expansion and specialization later, the questions of who receives care and who pays for it remain profoundly unresolved. Maternal and infant mortality rates are unacceptably high. The working poor face impossible barriers. Immigrant populations are left behind. Infectious diseases continue to create significant morbidity. These are not abstractions. They are the daily reality of communities that medicine has long promised to serve.
A Mission for Every Era
The school that Fry-Bowers leads was founded in 1954, rooted in the traditions of the Sisters of Mercy and the Jesuit Catholic values of the University of San Francisco. Its mission, to improve the health of all populations through equitable and compassionate service, value-driven research, and innovative education, was not written for a specific moment in time. It was written for all of them, including this one.
Two Latin principles animate the school’s culture and give that mission its texture. Cura personalis, care for the whole person, and cura apostolica, care for the whole project, shape everything here: how curricula are designed, how clinical partnerships are built, and how the school’s faculty and leadership are asked to think about their responsibilities to the world beyond the classroom.
Against the Current
For decades, nursing education has largely been organized around hospital-based, acute-care frameworks. Licensure structures reinforce the pattern, requiring limited coursework in community health and orienting nearly 80 percent of nursing curricula toward inpatient settings. USF SONHP argues that this pattern is failing the communities nurses are meant to serve.
The school is deliberately moving against that current. It envisions a fundamental shift: away from what it calls the sick-care industrial complex, toward a genuine health-development model. Public health, social determinants of health, and population-level thinking are not electives here. They are core competencies expected of every graduate.
Learning Where It Matters Most
The Nurse Health Equity Scholars Initiative, known as NHESI and funded by a federal HRSA Workforce Expansion Grant, is where that philosophy becomes lived practice. Pre-licensure BSN students are immersed, for all their direct-care clinical education, in a single comprehensive public safety-net health system: either Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center in San Francisco, or Alameda Health System in Oakland.
The logic is grounded in evidence. Students who learn in safety-net environments, alongside patients across the full spectrum of social and economic experience, are more likely to choose to practice in those environments as professionals. They develop not just clinical skill but something harder to teach: the professional commitment to stay.
BSN student Paul Uong, a NHESI scholar, described the experience plainly: “Caring for patients across all socioeconomic backgrounds has taught me that nursing is about more than treating illness. It is about meeting people where they are, understanding their stories, and showing up with compassion in moments of vulnerability.”
There is a particular kind of knowledge that comes only from being present in those rooms. SONHP is making sure its graduates carry it before they enter the profession.
The Intelligence Question
Few conversations in healthcare feel more contested right now than the one about artificial intelligence. SONHP has chosen to engage it deliberately and early. In partnership with Drive Health, the school piloted the Avery agentic AI caregiver platform in simulated learning environments, introducing pre-licensure students to a tool designed to support clinical communication, documentation, patient education, and low-acuity care tasks.
The framing of this initiative matters. The school is not suggesting that AI can replace nursing judgment. Values, intuition, clinical reasoning, and therapeutic presence are irreducibly human. But nurses who enter practice without fluency in AI-enabled workflows will be underprepared for the environments they will actually work in. SONHP is now integrating AI literacy systematically across both nursing and public health curricula, building graduates who can engage these tools ethically, critically, and effectively.
Nurses at the Policy Table
One of the most consequential, and least-discussed, gaps in nursing education is policy literacy. Nurses hold a position of unmatched proximity to patients. They witness, every shift, the real consequences of insurance denials, food insecurity, housing instability, and inadequate access to preventive care. Yet they are rarely equipped to translate that frontline knowledge into policy action. SONHP considers that gap unacceptable.
Since 2023, Dean Fry-Bowers has brought undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral nursing students to the annual American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Student Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., held alongside the AACN Dean’s Meeting, where participants engage directly with federal policymakers and develop skills in translating scientific evidence and patient experience into legislative advocacy.
Leveraging the Student Policy Summit, USF has developed a “policy scholars” program for attendees that is scaffolded with pre- and post-summit mentorship, creating a sustained arc of leadership development rather than a single isolated event. The goal is to produce nursing advocacy ambassadors: science-informed, policy-literate, and ready to represent the profession where health policy is actually shaped.
Recognition and Reach
The school’s momentum has drawn national attention. Dean Fry-Bowers was selected for the inaugural cohort of the Bedford Falls Foundation Academic Nursing Innovation Fellows (ANI Fellows), a highly selective two-year program that brings together deans, curriculum architects, and clinical partnership leaders from across a deliberate cross-section of American nursing education. The program is designed not for incremental improvement but for systems-level transformation: reducing early-career attrition, building practice-ready graduates, and strengthening the nursing workforce that communities depend on.
The school’s alumni already embody that ambition. Jian Zhang, DNP ’12, recently retired CEO of San Francisco Chinese Hospital, developed a bilingual community outreach program during COVID-19 that helped Chinatown achieve one of the nation’s lowest infection and death rates, a model later adopted by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Jim D’Alfonso, DNP ’17, Executive Director of Professional Excellence at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, cites USF’s Ignatian values and Caring Science framework as foundational to his life of service. Joyce Nortey, MPH, MSBH ’18, Senior Director of Clinical Research and Digital Health Initiatives at Evidation Health, traces her professional commitment to equity-centered innovation back to her years at USF.
The Invitation
The future of healthcare, SONHP argues, belongs to professionals willing to hold complexity without retreating from it: those who understand that clinical excellence and social justice are not competing values but expressions of the same calling.
USF SONHP is preparing those professionals.
For more than seventy years, USF SONHP has occupied a distinctive place in American nursing education. It is not tiptoeing into that future. It is marching boldly, carrying that history as fuel and led by a mission that has never been more necessary.
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