Taking blood pressure, learning how to interact with patients and make beds with people in them are some of the things being taught in the Taylor’s School of Nursing’s first semester.
Any challenges the School of Nursing has faced hasn’t been with teaching, Karen Elsea, dean of nursing said.
“I mean we've all taught in other schools, so it's not the big hurdle of teaching for the very first time,” Elsea said. “But each time you teach something for the first time — anywhere — just little things you have to kind of work through. It's going well — I think the students are excited.”
Since the School of Nursing just started, Elsea said they had last semester to prepare which is why it has been a pretty smooth process. The nursing students also had J-term to get an idea of what the program and being a nurse looks like.
There are 20 students in the clinical phase of the program. These students are taking nursing classes called physical assessment, fundamentals and pathophysiology in nursing. Additionally, they have a microbiology class with the Biology Department, Elsea said.
Nursing students get exposed to the foundational things that will prepare them to interact with patients in their labs: physical assessment and fundamentals.
“Lab is kind of the hands-on piece, which has been going really well,” Hannah Haines, nursing simulation and lab coordinator, said.
The skills students practice during the labs are skills they may have not had to use before.
Haines said one of the labs is getting a patient into a wheelchair, using crutches or a walker - even practiced assisted patient fall. Some of these skills, she said, are not listed in their textbook, but it is easier to learn these things in a lab setting before a patient actually falls on a nurse in a clinical setting.
“So we try to throw some kind of stress training in there a little bit,” Haines said. “Just so they kind of learn when something goes wrong how they can deal with it in a safe environment — in a controlled environment.”
Elsea said nursing students are learning in the classroom, taking that knowledge and performing it back to the instructor. She said students are getting used to the stress of being evaluated by performance.
Towards the end of this semester in April, students in the clinical phase will visit extended care facilities to practice what they have learned in labs.
“They get the opportunity to do some physical assessments and interviews with patients like, getting their medical history — things like that — just getting comfortable in the environment, and talking is also a skill to develop,” Elsea said.
Junior Ella Chegar is one of the 20 students in the clinical phase of the nursing program.
Chegar said the labs excite her for future nursing classes. She has found the technology helpful, especially the dummies, in getting to see the procedure of how things are done on the human body.
With the technology aspect, one of the “dummies” is a little boy programmed to cry, talk and have a pulse which is helpful for practice, Chegar said. It is possible to even “blood ox” on it (finding the oxygen in the blood).
“I do hear of nurses that you learn most of your stuff when you're in the hospital itself,” Chegar said. “You still learn a lot of important skills in the class, obviously like that.”
