Nurses and nursing care are central to the delivery of safe and effective patient care. Ensuring an adequate nursing workforce and creating a work environment that supports nursing practice and interdisciplinary collaboration are top priorities at St. Luke’s Medical Center.



That’s why St. Luke’s has partnered with Land Tejas Companies, a Houston-based real estate management and investment company that specializes in community development, to encourage nursing as a career choice.

Land Tejas has donated $1 million to St. Luke’s to help strengthen a critical hospital resource: nursing. The gift will be pledged over a five-year period starting in 2006.

The gift has four components, each designed to encourage nursing as a career.

• Part of the gift will provide funding for associate degree scholarships to qualified nursing candidates.
   
• It will also fund the Patient Care Assistant Summer Externship Program at St. Luke’s, which is open to local high school students and helps create interest in health care.
   
• Funds also will be allocated for St. Luke’s Patient Care Assistant career development and for nursing scholarships for the children of St. Luke’s employees.
   
• This gift will also provide the funds for St. Luke's to establish 15 associate degree nursing scholarships in perpetuity at Cy-Fair College, a North Harris/Montgomery County Community College. St. Luke's will work closely with the staff of the college to develop criteria for the scholarships that include clinical rotation and preceptorships at St. Luke's main campus in the Texas Medical Center and at St. Luke's Community Medical Center - The Woodlands. A donation by Land Tejas, in addition to the one made to St. Luke's, will provide Cy-Fair College funding for three master's prepared faculty members, which will allow the college the capability to incrementally increase its nursing student enrollment from 30 to 100.