Tag: women in business

Mary Grace Simcox is passionate about educating nurses and allied health professionals.

As she prepares for retirement from Pa. College of Health Sciences (Pa. College) at the end of the year, Simcox reflected on her 26 years of helping grow the college from a diploma program to a fully accredited college offering associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs.

As of Jan. 1, 2024, Pa. College will become part of St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, a merger that Simcox decided to see through, postponing her retirement for a few years.

“It’s been an adventure. I’ve gotten to do things very few people get to do,” Simcox, the first and only president of Pa. College, said sitting in her office at Pa. College, 850 Greenfield Road, Lancaster. “I’ve been working in the health care industry for nearly my entire life, beginning as a nurse. In the blink of an eye, I was serving as the president of an institution that had evolved more than I ever imagined.”

Simcox came to Lancaster to serve as dean of Nursing for Lancaster General Hospital’s (LGH) Lancaster Institute School For Health Education (LIHE) in 1997 from the Roxborough School of Nursing where she served as director.

Seven months later, she said she was given an interim role overseeing all LIHE’s programs, a position that became permanent in 1998.

“I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up,” she said with a chuckle. “A core group of us took a year to answer that question pertaining to the school.”

Simcox said the group looked at keeping the status quo, forming a relationship with a college or establishing their own college.

“At the time, professionals needed a degree, not a diploma to practice. We went to LGH and asked them to start our own college. They said yes,” she said.

The Lancaster General College of Nursing and Health Sciences started as a two-year junior college and within five years, it was a four-year institution offering bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate programs.

That process, she said, included changing state regulations and accreditor guidelines.

“The day the college opened in 2009; we went from 100 students to 372. This year, we have just under 2,000,” she said. “We’ve grown by double digits every year.”

Part of the transformation into a four-year school included adding The Center for Excellence in Practice, which is the college’s simulation center and the first and only learning space of its kind in the region.

Simcox said the center includes more than 20,000 square feet of immersive, interdisciplinary, and hyper-realistic clinical simulation space with 24 rooms, including an intensive care unit.

Simcox fondly talked about how the school was spread throughout Lancaster City as it grew.

“We were in an elementary school on Lime Street and ran out of space, so LGH bought three row homes we used for offices. We then moved into the old May-Grant OBYN building down Lime Street,” she said. “When we ran out of space, we expanded into the Burle Industries complex and found we were spread all over.”

The school changed its name to Pa. College in 2013 to reflect its status as a college and moved to its current location in 2016.

“We had it all. It was quite the journey to come here and bring everything together at one location,” Simcox said. “It’s a journey few people get to have with phenomenal people.”

Simcox said many of the faculty and staff have been with Pa. College for 20 to 30 years and many were students at the school.

“They are a pleasure to work with,” she said, adding they are dedicated to the teaching profession, one that in the health care industry, is not as lucrative as staying in nursing itself.

“It’s difficult to find educators because practicing in health care earns you more money,” she said, pointing out that was the case even before the pandemic.

“Health care requires you to have a master’s or a doctorate to teach so not only does an educator leave a career where they make a lot of money, but they have to go back to school and pay for it,” Simcox said. “The average age of educators is pushing 60, so it’s an issue.”

For Simcox, being an educator “has been an honor and a privilege to educate the next generation. I have a say in who they are and how they develop.”

When Simcox came to Lancaster, a job she has commuted to from Philadelphia every day, she had to give up being in the classroom.

“When you are an administrator, you have to give things up, but I’m still attuned to all we do here and to our students,” she said. “I miss teaching, but other things needed to be done.”

In looking at the big picture, Simcox said she and her team are doing what needs to be done to ensure the county has what it needs. She said most students, who are typically in their 30s with families, stay in the area.

“Most of our students have jobs before they graduate,” she said.

Simcox said the affiliation with St. Joseph’s will offer students more opportunities than Pa. College alone could offer them. She cited more general education courses and opportunities to study abroad.

“They also have limited counseling and health services and the faculty cross teach in disciplines we don’t have,” she said.

For St. Joseph’s, the merger gives them the health care portfolio it didn’t have.

“We were told that St. Joseph’s thought they were losing students who were looking for health care professions, so this is a way for them to grow and offer what the students are looking for,” Simcox said.

Locally, the merger won’t change much more than the signage on the outside of the building. Simcox said none of the current programming is changing and the faculty and staff will remain.

All the names inside the building will stay, she said, because the rooms are named for donors.

Simcox, reflecting on her 26 years, said her fondest memory is the support she and her staff received from the health care system.

“The trustees are a dedicated group who understood what this was about, and they gave us the green light and then got out of our way and let us do what we needed to do,” she said. “They supported us with no micromanagement. That in itself was wonderful.”

Looking at the college as it is today in its own building, Simcox said, “I did not do this, we did it with people willing to put in the hours. They do it because their heart is in the right place.

“There is something at the end of Route 30 that has pulled me here for 26 years. I’ve loved being here every minute of every day.”