University of Nebraska Medical Center

The state of Nebraska was eager to host the 2010 Special Olympics USA National Games on July 18 - 23, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln served as home base for the participating athletes and provided venues for several events.

Successful aging is about living where you want to live, doing what you want to do and enjoying a full life. It’s about preventing future illness and improving quality of life with small changes that bring big rewards.

Successful aging is about living where you want to live, doing what you want to do and enjoying a full life. It’s about preventing future illness and improving quality of life with small changes that bring big rewards. The Home Instead Center for Successful Aging at the University of Nebraska Medical Center offers this and more.

More than 1,000 qualified nursing school applicants have unfortunately been turned away by the University of Nebraska College of Nursing in the last five years.

Who will care for you?

World-renowned chest radiologist Jud Gurney passed away March 18 after a short battle with cancer. The longtime faculty member in the Department of Radiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center was revered by colleagues and students as a dedicated radiologist and passionate educator.

When asked to rank the importance of student support on a scale of one to ten, Koua Moua, a student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, replied without hesitation, “ten.”

Support for students through private donations to scholarship funds is instrumental in changing many students’ dreams of attending college into reality - and Moua is one of those students.

“With family medicine you get to know the whole family. I enjoy seeing the patients and developing a relationship with them…Learning all aspects of their health as compared to just seeing them one time for one problem.” Without a scholarship Natalie would have to rely more on her parents than she would like. If she had been offered scholarships elsewhere and none at UNMC, Natalie would still be at Nebraska due to its emphasis on primary care and rural medicine.

The four campuses of the University of Nebraska again ranked well among their peer institutions by the U.S. News and World Report’s 2010 edition of Best Colleges.

In each category, data of up to 15 indicators of academic quality are gathered from each school and analyzed according to the magazine’s own methodology. Among them include peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, class size, student-to-faculty ratio, financial resources and alumni giving.

The College of Nursing strives to educate more nurses in Nebraska with the opening of a new program in Norfolk, Neb., in partnership with Northeast Community College. The program is a priority, as Nebraska’s medical community faces a shortage of more than 4,000 nurses by 2020, and the current national shortage of nurses is expected to grow by more than 20 percent over the next decade. The college is rallying around modern facilities to take in more students, creating accelerated education programs, proposing higher academic standards for better care quality, and making certain its graduates are prepared for challenges ahead.

Inspired by his late wife’s battle with pancreatic cancer, a Lincoln man has created a $58,000 endowment through the University of Nebraska Foundation to be used for pancreatic cancer research.

The endowment was established by Jerry Varner, a part-time professor and alumnus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Varner’s wife, Carolynn “Carrie,” died last April. In October, the couple would have been married 50 years.