The additional employment of virtual clinical technology, the extension of counseling services, and use of nursing students to administer COVID vaccines in rural areas are three findings from a pair of recent surveys administered by the National League for Nursing (NLN). The surveys of nursing school deans and directors were conducted in January and February of this year.
With schools restricted in providing in-person clinical experiences due to COVID, the use of virtual clinical experiences helped prepare nursing students. Some 72.2% of the surveyed nursing schools provided clinical experiences through virtual clinical simulation because of limited access to clinical settings.
Compared to other years, “that is a high number because, generally, students would be getting their clinical experiences in the clinical settings,” said Janice Brewington, PhD, RN, FAAN
Chief Program Officer and Director, Center for Transformational Leadership at the NLN in an interview. Those clinical experiences, she noted, include both going into clinical practice in hospitals or other settings in the community, as well as skills development.
Psych support
To address the psychological effects of COVID on students and/or faculty, many nursing schools (41.5%) either added or improved counseling services, the survey found. In addition, 15.1% of nursing schools introduced mental health services.
Whether the service provided was called counseling, mental health, or something else “the whole idea is that you’re there to support the student and the mental anguish that they’re having in this whole process,” said Beverly Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN, President and CEO, NLN.
Students giving shots
Although 55.7% of schools said that their students were not administering COVID vaccines in the community, of those schools that were having students administer vaccines, 40% served rural areas, compared with 32% in urban areas and 28% in both urban and rural areas. Some 60% of faculty, the survey found, were available to supervise students giving shots in the community.
As might be expected, most schools (67.4%) said that junior or senior nursing students were participating in administering vaccines; 28.8% said that only seniors were giving shots, according to an executive summary. And almost two-thirds of schools (63.2%) indicated that students received credit for community services for giving the vaccine.
Other findings included:
- Some 178 full-time faculty resigned or retired early due specifically to COVID.
- PPE was used in most schools by faculty and students in classrooms/labs and clinical settings.
- Some 65% of schools said students giving the COVID vaccine in the community had received the vaccine; 73% said faculty supervising student administration of the vaccine had received the vaccine.
Of the survey results, Dr. Brewington says she found it interesting “how schools were mobilizing their students and faculty to provide vaccinations in the community.” The schools forged collaborative partnerships with hospitals, public health departments, community health centers and other community entities, she notes. Nursing, she says, is about “caring and providing services to patients, families and the community.”
Now a freelance writer and editor, he served as a Director at Elsevier, where he was instrumental in the development of major online nursing reference and procedure products. Previously, he served as Editorial Director at Nurses.com, one of the first nursing websites, and was Executive Editor at Nursing magazine, a premier large-circulation journal.
Today, he continues to serve nurses and other clinicians by reporting on developments and trends in healthcare with meaning, context, and insight.
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