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Platte Valley hired a coordinator to run the pilot program and serve as a liaison to local universities. The first student cohort includes about 20 students, with 13 from Colorado Christian University and the rest from other area nursing schools, Gensert said.
Platte Valley is also paying to put 15 of the extern mentors through the clinical scholar program at Colorado Christian, opening the door to professional advancement.
“It breeds a certain excitement,” said Gensert, who didn’t want burned-out nurses to feel like being a preceptor was another assigned task.
The hospital received a $1.5 million grant from Adams County, where it’s located, to fund the extern program for two years. In the future, the organization will pay for the program from its operating budget, Gensert said.
Although the nurse extern program does require time, money and resources, Gensert called it a “strategic necessity.”
He said that hospitals, especially those like Platte Valley that aren’t academic medical centers, should establish strong partnerships with local universities and develop programs together.
“You will easily make your money back in comparison to the spend you would have on a 13-week (travel nurse) contract,” Gensert said.
The road forward
Some educators have adjusted their curricula to account for the pandemic’s enduring challenge.
NYU’s Glassman said that while nursing students always learned about infection control, they now spend more time on donning and doffing personal protective equipment in the simulation lab and are fit-tested for N95 respirators. More broadly, the school’s curriculum has increasingly focused on resiliency and adaptability, she said.
“COVID is a great case study of how you can’t always expect to be perfect. While we teach people the perfect way to do something, we’re talking more about how you would adapt something in the moment,” Glassman said. “You need to be aware that there is always going to be something else coming around the corner that you haven’t seen.”
Patty Knecht, chief nursing officer for ATI Nursing Education, a company that provides testing and licensure exam preparation tools for undergraduate nursing programs, said new graduates might not enter the workforce with the exact clinical training for their jobs, but they should be able to apply basic nursing principles to each setting.
“We prepare generalists to enter the workforce market. The point that will keep that generalist safe is their ability to have core foundational knowledge and then this ability to think through what we call this clinical judgment process,” Knecht said.
To that end, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing wants to evaluate potential nurses on their critical thinking and decision-making ability. It expects to update its National Council Licensure Examination, which graduates must pass to earn a state nursing license, in 2023 to test candidates more on their clinical judgment.
And despite the challenges facing nursing and medical students during the pandemic, industry veterans say students are effectively getting a crash course in the unpredictability of the healthcare field. Cleveland Clinic’s Stoller, who is board-certified in internal medicine, pulmonary disease and critical-care medicine, said he’s noticed new doctors’ grit—an important trait for those in a hard, stressful profession.
“The bottom line is, I think, this is a generation that’s grown up with demonstrable resilience,” Stoller said.
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