Maggie Hannon |
Nursing students who dream of helping bring new life into the world have a brand new lab for learning the ins and outs of maternal-child care.
The School of Nursing had a formal dedication and blessing of the new maternal-child simulation lab Monday, Jan. 12. The department opened the new lab after Fall Break, thanks to $40,000 in gifts.
Joanne Warner, dean of the School of Nursing, said the school planned the dedication after the new year as a way of highlighting the addition to the department.
“We planned it to be the first day of classes,” Warner said. “New year, new suite, new beginnings.”
The nursing school received $25,000 from the Collins Medical Trust and $15,000 from Mario and Donna Giordano, whose daughter, Amber Giordano Livingston, is a 2011 nursing school graduate and is currently in the University’s doctor of nursing practice program.
Warner said the new lab will provide students with a safe space to practice skills and acquire confidence before they begin clinical work.
“We can look at what are some clinical scenarios that every nursing graduate needs to have experience, and then we can provide that,” Warner said. “So it’s intentional, structured and safe.”
In the lab, students can work with mannequins that emulate a newborn baby, a child and a postpartum mother. Before the maternal-child simulation lab, nursing students could only do obstetrics or pediatrics through clinical experiences.
“The sim lab really rounds out my experience and gives me experience in a specialty which I won’t be able to be in the real world for,” junior Molly Hicks said. “I’m getting a lot of experience in pediatrics, but with the sim lab I also get to know how to work with an OB patient if the opportunity ever came up.”
Although the space used to be classrooms, nursing senior Bella Raugi said the new lab is a much better use for their department.
“There used to just be classrooms where the lab is, and I think it serves a thousand times better as a lab than just two random classrooms. We didn’t really need that much space,” Raugi said.
Warner thinks the new lab can augment student experiences by providing more practice outside of clinical work. She said that current study found that 50 percent of clinical education could also be accomplished by high quality simulation.
“We are a practice discipline, so we have to have opportunities to take what we’ve learned in the classroom and take what we know and apply it to individuals and families and unfolding scenarios in real life,” Warner said.
Hicks said students are very excited about the new maternal-child suite and that it gives lower classmen more experiences as well.
“For the juniors and the seniors, it’s really exciting to have something new and shiny to look forward to,” Hicks said. “And for the freshmen and the sophomores, I think it’s a really good experience for them to be able to come and watch because it makes nursing school not seems as scary or unknown as it used to be.”
Maggie Hannon is a reporter for The Beacon. She can be reached at hannon15@up.edu.
