Case Western Reserve University nursing students get right to work learning critical nursing skills that they put to use in clinical settings just three weeks into their first semester.
First-year student Maren Padovan-Hickman combined her natural inclination to help others with the priority of developing her nursing skills straight away, and she had an early opportunity to jump into “nurse mode”:
“Last month in our clinical, there was an emergency fire evacuation on the long-term care unit. My classmates and I jumped right in, and it was as if some whole other part of my brain clicked on. I was in full-blown nurse mode. I felt a responsibility to get my patients away from the fire and to safety on the other side of the fire doors. Even though it was a stressful and dangerous situation, in that moment I felt like a real nurse. And no one was hurt by the fire!”
At Case Western Reserve, our nursing students receive 1,300 hours of clinical experience to develop the technical knowledge to complement their innate tendency to care.
Article Date
November 20, 2019
