Nursing program simulates real life

Alicia Sage

Entertainment Editor

Two recent additions purchased from a grant for the Shasta College nursing program allow students to experience realistic situations and prepare them for future experiences.

A new Sim. Man and Sim. Infant allow students to experience situations they would face in the real world, and help them learn from their mistakes. These simulated patients make it so every student can experience a patient in shock and see how their actions affect the patient’s outcome.

“We are looking at getting a (Sim.) child and a birthing mother which would really help us” said Susan Westler of the nursing faculty.

That’s good news for a program that has graduated 1690 students since its start in 1965.

The first start for students to join the class is finish a list of prerequisites. Also students need to look for information sessions which direct them on how to fill out the packet for the program, how to get transcripts, and what to do when the transcripts come. In the last semester of finishing prerequisites, the students attend the information session, fill out the packet, and get their name on a wait list for the class, which currently is about 2 years in length.

“Our wait list is incredibly long right now. We have 174 people on the wait list,” says Westler.

The program decided on switching to a wait-list system because it allowed everyone to have a chance at getting into the program. Previous methods included a lottery system where students could possibly not be chosen for semesters at a time, as well as a ranking system which excluded students who didn’t have the highest grades.

The program admits 30-35 students each semester, and frequently gets re-entry students from past semesters on a space available basis. Students take classes focusing around med-surg, or medical surgical nursing, pediatrics and obstetrics.

During the summer, the school also offers a pharmacology class and a nurses aide class, as well as a nurse refresher course.

“The Nurse Refresher course is like nursing school in six weeks,” said Westler. “It is made for people who have already been a registered nurse,” she added.

The nursing program is a total of 48 units, 4 semesters with 12 units per semester. Between 4.5 and 6 units of the program are spent doing clinical work. Students spend time in hospital settings as well as blood banks, psych facilities, dialysis clinics and various home health agencies. Classes span from 19-20 year old students, to students in their fifties. Though most of the entrants are female, the class usually consists of about one third male and two thirds female, however one semester the ratio was almost fifty-fifty.

The teacher student ratio for the class varies. In the first semester there is one teacher for every 30 students, but as the semesters progress they break up into groups of 15 or groups of 10 per teacher.

After graduating from the program, students receive a permit which allows them to work in the hospital until their boards come through. The success rate for Shasta College students passing the boards is in the 90 percentile.

After passing the boards, many students are hired into hospitals locally, while some decide to do acute care, psych. nursing, as well as traveling nursing. Traveling nurses have the option of working anywhere in the U.S. or doing foreign nursing in places like Saudi Arabia.

“We rarely have a student who is looking for a job, who doesn’t have one by the time they graduate,” says Westler.