Nursing
Pilots Prevent
March 30, 2021
University of Portland’s student nurses live for their clinical rotations, when they finally get the chance to take what they’ve learned and practiced at school and apply it to real world situations. But, due to COVID, a group of juniors poised to work pediatric and ob-gyn rotations in a local hospital this spring found their internships canceled. But UP’s nursing program is nothing if not resourceful, and the students were quickly set up with a new opportunity to get experience with live patients while doing something to actively fight the nemesis that thwarted their plans: administering COVID-19 vaccines at the Oregon Convention Center.
Although giving shots wasn’t the clinical experience they had in mind, the students say it was a more educational, and meaningful, experience than they expected.
“The silver lining is we get more patient interactions than at a hospital,” says junior Cova Li. “It’s a high volume of people coming in that you’re interacting with. You’re seeing 50 different people and it’s going fast, so it really helps with the people skills. You’re restarting a conversation every couple minutes.”
Li says at first the idea of working with real, live patients was both exhilarating and terrifying. For her first shift, she had just a few minutes of training at the convention center before facing a steady stream of people for the next four hours.
“It was really exciting, but I was so nervous,” she says. “I hadn’t had the chance to work on real people before. I know what I’m supposed to do, but can I put it in action? Talk to people? Do the medical checks?”
Katherine Lund, also a junior nursing student, felt the same way. “I got there by 6 a.m. and by 6:30 I was giving vaccines for the first time ever. That was really scary at first, but once I gave my first few, I was like ‘oh I have the skillset to do this.’”
For junior Jake Riegel, “Making that transition from inanimate object to actual people was nerve-wracking but really cool,” he says. “There’s so much more to giving a vaccine to an actual person who has feelings and complex conditions compared to the rubber sponge thing that we have in the class. But I was able to apply what I know and realize it wasn’t as difficult as I was making it seem in my head.”
The students say working with a steady onslaught of different people gave them an incredibly valuable learning experience in patient care.
“Even though it’s just the vaccine, it’s not always as simple as that,” says Li. “There’s still an aspect of clinical judgment, of knowing if this person’s previous history will affect things.”
And, of course, real, live adults come with an unpredictable set of emotions too. “Each patient is different. A lot come in scared because it’s an experimental vaccine or what they’ve heard about side effects, or because they’re scared of shots in general,” says Lund. “It was nice to use the tactics I’ve learned that I thought would be best to comfort them and calm them down.”
Li says the factor of unpredictability was perhaps the most significant part of the experience. “I had a patient who said she was going to be anxious, and as I was starting to administer the shot she started absolutely balling and hyperventilating. Thankfully the site prepared us for something like that and I could bring her to the back room where she could lay down while I administered it. It was a huge learning experience that not everyone can come in, sit, take it and leave. There are still all of these unknown factors that can come in and make you think on your feet.”
Administering the vaccines also gave the students a sense of confidence they can carry with them when they graduate. “This was my first experience one-on-one with patients as an authority figure, and it was a really worthwhile to be able to take that autonomy, answer questions, and use my knowledge to help people,” says Lund. “A lot of us in nursing school right now don’t feel as prepared as nurses have prior because we’ve been taken out of so much, so it was nice to see that I do have these skills and I know my stuff.”
The students said it also felt good to actively help individual people and, ultimately, the community at large. After all, that’s why they were drawn to nursing in the first place.
“It feels nice to not be sitting around at home not doing anything, especially being in nursing school,” says Li. “You’re like, ‘I’m learning all of this stuff, I want to go apply it and help people.’ Being able to administer the vaccine, I felt like I can finally do something besides just wearing a mask.”
Lund says she also loved feeling like she was part of a historic moment. “I felt like I was doing something important. It was super surreal to walk in, the National Guard is there, people are in scrubs and uniforms. To be involved in a vaccine rollout during this time was amazing.”
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