It’s been a long two years for health care workers, but nursing students from the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center remain devoted to helping their community.
COVID-19 has created numerous challenges for the health care industry and many nurses are leaving the profession, with burnout being a significant contributor. Despite the news, nursing students such as Madison McCauley and Cara Trindle look forward to putting their skills to the test and connecting with patients.
The Students
For Madison McCauley, the level-two nursing student in Lubbock said she wanted to build deeper connections with people and be an advocate for patients, so she switched from marketing to nursing. She said she’s aware of the toll COVID-19 has had on nurses, but it’s made her like nursing even more.
“I see how hard all these nurses and doctors even are working because there’s long hours, no one wants to work COVID, you have to wear all the PPE,” McCauley said. “I feel like nothing could really ever stop nurses from caring for people.”
The move from in-person to online learning was stressful, but McCauley said her professors made the best of the situation. She said working with the simulations have been helpful for her preparation because they feel like real-life scenarios.
Cara Trindle, a level-two nursing student, said Texas Tech’s professors make her feel confident about going into the nursing profession because they know what students need to know to be the best nurses possible.
But Trindle said from her time working as a nursing assistant during the pandemic, she’s nervous for other students who had limited practice or experience. She said taking on roles nurses usually do and seeing people get sicker without their families was hard.
“It didn’t scare me away, but it does make me nervous going in, knowing that it’s going to be a little tougher than it used to be for new nurses starting,” Trindle said. “A lot more is expected of them, and they’re going to be a lot busier than what it would have looked like a few years ago.”
Research from the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Health reveals health care workers are more likely to experience job burnout when they cannot address the needs of their patients due to high workload and inappropriate work conditions.
The School
The past two years have created several obstacles for health care, but it’s also created new ways of communicating and learning.
Dr. Sharon Decker, executive director of the TTUHSC simulation program, said while the pandemic was a challenging time for faculty and students alike, it also provided new learning techniques that the school hopes to continue to use in the future.
Because of the fast-paced changes COVID-19 brought to healthcare, Decker said she hopes students remember to be flexible and adaptable moving forward. It's a complex field, she said, and not all students understand that.
“I'm just hoping that we can keep the avenues open to assist the students as they move through the process," Decker said. "So that they're ready for the health care environment that they hit.”
The simulation program will only be stronger from the changes, Decker said. Some of the positives from COVID-19 include increased networking and a greater emphasis on tele-health skills.
The Future
Abilene nursing student Trindle said it’s a difficult degree to earn, but she looks forward to putting all the work from nursing school into practice one day.
There’s a need for nurses now more than ever, she said, and while she’s still excited to be a nurse, it’s a little scary with everything going on.
“I really hope to see nursing become a little bit more personalized again, because we kind of got into that area where you are taking care of so many patients that you are just doing the basics of what you need to do in order to care for them," Trindle said. “You're not getting to really know them as a person and connect with them.”