Pilots Prevent
November 23, 2021
Hands-on experience is a key component of a University of Portland education, and even though COVID-19 has limited some of the field experience opportunities usually available to students, by the same token it has opened up some surprising new avenues for growth and development.
Take, for example, the School of Nursing. COVID put the kibosh on many of the hospital clinicals traditionally available to students. But on the flip side it has created new clinical opportunities in population health and triggered additional curriculum components in telehealth — both of which are fast becoming essential to the future of nursing.
“Everyone is used to the typical scenario of going to a hospital and doing your clinical, but a lot of that time is spent standing around,” says Joane Moceri, associate dean of the School of Nursing. “We have intentional placement for junior students in population health, which is thinking of the population as your client as opposed to the individual.”
Students are working with the elderly population through places like the McDonald Center, and with agencies such as Portland Fire and Rescue that support the houseless population. “Through these clinicals, the students are getting a wonderful education in looking at all the social determinants of health, like place and food,” says Moceri. “We’ve asked our graduates what helped them the most to get their jobs, and they say population health. They said, ‘No one asked if we had ever started an IV; they wanted to know how well do we think critically, how well do we work with people?’”
UP nursing students are also gaining valuable experience in the subtleties of working directly with the public through administering COVID and flu vaccines in clinics both on and off campus. And simulated teleheath visits, which feature actors playing the role of patients, have been so successful, they’re now a key part of the curriculum.
“Covid has driven our innovation at a faster speed,” says Moceri. “At a national conference I went to in October, hearing about where nursing needs to go, I was thinking, ‘We’re already there.’ We’ve really become leaders in nursing education. We’ve learned that we have to be flexible, and flexibility is a great attribute of any nurse. We’re going to keep taking the lessons we learned during COVID, that have been useful and helpful, and keep driving that innovation forward.”
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