Katie Shull flips on an air compressor that hangs above a hospital bed in a newly converted room. Shull, an assistant professor of nursing at UAS Ketchikan, explains.
“So students can hook up oxygen tubing and use nebulizer equipment and other oxygenation devices to simulate what they would do in a clinical setting,” she said.
The device is one of several new medical items nursing students will use in their hands-on training.
Just minutes before, Shull and other university employees had snipped a ceremonial blue ribbon for the new nursing lab. The space looks and feels identical to a shared hospital room, with a whiteboard that displays a patient’s status and an eye test chart.
Shull says that’s a step up for nursing students in Ketchikan, who had been doing their course lab work at the university’s Maritime Training Center near downtown since the program’s inception in the 1990s.
“Even though we had all of the bits and pieces there that we needed to learn and build and grow nurses, it wasn’t set up in a way that was so conducive to realism,” Shull said. “And when there’s a large gap between that realism in the practice setting and then the realism in the clinical practice setting with patients, it can cause more discomfort and anxiety than we’d like to see.”
The nurses in training shared the old space with welding and maritime students. Shull says it was distracting at times. It was also small – students couldn’t easily move medical equipment around. And carpeted, making cleanup of liquids like IV fluid difficult.
The new nursing lab was converted from largely unused classrooms on UAS Ketchikan’s main campus. There’s also a new single-patient room where students can record and later review their training with a camera that hangs from the wall. The lab is for training without patients. Nursing students on the island eventually will go to PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center, a stone’s throw away, for their clinical training with patients.
One of those students is Frankie Urquhart, who’s in her final year of the school’s two-year nursing program. She used to train in the old space downtown but is excited to practice in a more accommodating environment.
“There’s already a steep learning curve when you go into a hospital and you’re learning all the things, but when you can be familiar already, because you’ve experienced it in the classroom, it makes that anxiety go down just a lot, actually,” she said.
Construction of the $375,000 space began in the spring. It was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education and a grant from the Certified Health and Maritime Programs for Southeast Alaska, or CHAMPS.
William Urquhart, UAS Ketchikan campus director and Frankie’s husband, says some students in the program have already begun training in the new nursing lab.
He hopes the new space will help grow the school’s health sciences programs.
“You don’t have to leave Ketchikan to become a certified nurse aide, a medical assistant, a registered nurse, or even more advanced levels of education in health care,” he said. “Ketchikan has a high need for all of those professions.”
Right now, PeaceHealth Medical Center is advertising openings for about 20 nursing positions.
Hunter Morrison is a Report for America corps member for KRBD. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution.
