TORRINGTON – Nursing students at Eastern Wyoming College have dealt not only with campus closures and remote learning customary to all college students amid the pandemic, but they’ve also seen the worst of COVID-19 in the region’s hospitals.
Anna Schmick will graduate from EWC this spring with her nursing degree having experienced one of the most significant medical events in modern history through her clinicals at Torrington Community Hospital and Regional West Medical Center in Scottsbluff, Neb.
Students had the opportunity to work in Emergency Room, PCU and ICU situations, Schmick said, including the COVID-19 ICU, where she donned the necessary layers of required personal protective equipment and worked with patients recovering from a severe bout of the virus.
“What an eye-opening experience,” Schmick said. “In the COVID unit, we were allowed, as students, to help with their carelike on any other floor.”
Suzey Delger, director of EWC’s nursing program, said the program serves 20 students in Douglas and eight students in Torrington. The program moved to the virtual sphere last spring, meaning clinicals were replaced with case studies until they found a program where students can complete clinicals online.
David Currie, associate professor of nursing at EWC, was named the college’s 2019-2020 Innovative Educator of the Year for his work in adapting the nursing curriculum to the computer screen. Now, students and faculty use NurseTim for virtual clinicals, which simulate the nursing environment by giving students a patient, a diagnosis and a treatment plan, according to Delger. He also found a secure platform to conduct test- ing remotely and have adapted to the half in-person, half Zoom teaching style necessary when students are required to quarantine due to exposure or a positive COVID-19 test.
Future nurses were able to return to clinical sites this fall, Currie said, where they are seeing how valuable, and over-worked, these medical professionals are.
“Especially when you are working on a unit that is short, because staff has been cut from illness, seeing the rest of the staff try to pick up the slack,” he said. “We had to take care of lots of patients that were in serious, ICU critical care and a lot of them passed away. Those numbers that you hear of people who die from COVID, they did. They really did. We saw it live and in-person. We also took care of a lot of people who tested positive for COVID who turned out to be just fine.”
Schmick, who currently works as an emergency room tech at Platte County Memorial Hospital in Wheatland, said as she prepares for her final semester and a career in nursing, she feels prepared thanks to clinicals and hands-on experience amid COVID-19.
“I’m just so thankful to have the clinical experience we had last semester, as most students around the country didn’t have any clinical experience except for online or in-person simulations,” Schmick said. “I feel very confident.”
