A FAST TRACK TO NURSING

Along with exacerbating the nation’s nursing shortage, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many professionals to re-evaluate their career choices.

“One of the really interesting things we’ve seen with the Great Resignation is that during COVID, people thought about what’s really important. ‘What do I want to do?’ So we’ve seen a lot of mid-career people coming back,” Burke says.

To meet that demand, the School of Nursing, at the start of 2023, began offering an accelerated bachelor of science in nursing degree, a program allowing students to apply their previous academic experience to earn their degree in just 17 months. The full-time program is available to individuals who have already earned a bachelor’s degree in a non-nursing field and have completed all prerequisite courses.

Students who complete the program are guaranteed clinical placements with Loyola’s local health care partners.

“We have quite a few people who are not your typical 20- to 30- year-olds who are now coming back to our ABSN program,” Burke says.

With a new cohort of nursing undergraduates to educate, the College of Nursing and Health needed to give these students a space to practice.

In September, one year into the LoyolaOchsner BSN program, the university launched its $1.9 million Nursing Simulation Lab in partnership with Ochsner Health.

The tech-driven, experiential learning space provides students with hands-on opportunities in simulated inpatient and outpatient settings, as they prepare for careers in hospitals, labor and delivery rooms, emergency rooms, and other clinical settings.

“Everything in health care has evolved to where simulation is really embraced,” Burke says.

Collins recalled that when she was in nursing school, there was no such thing as “sim.”

“We practiced on each other,” she says. “When we learned how to start an IV, you’d turn around and get to start an IV on your student classmate.”

With the advanced simulation Loyola’s Sim Lab offers, students who are learning a skill for the first time no longer need to practice on humans — at least not until they’re ready.

“There’s a wealth of literature to show that simulation improves outcomes in the actual clinical setting,” Collins says.

The lab features lifelike, computerized mannequins that can replicate the body’s functions. The mannequins are designed to look and act like humans, allowing students to interact with them in the same way that they would with real patients.

“With computerization, they can talk. They can tell you, ‘Oooh, my stomach hurts so bad. I’m really in a lot of pain,’” Burke says, “and when you palpate their abdomen, it’s rigid.”

The mannequins also can be adjusted so that students can hear the “patient’s” heartbeat, lungs, stomach, and bowel sounds, much like a real human.

The lab also features wearable simulators and prostheses that students or patientactors can put on to give students more realistic patient experiences.

One example is a wearable birthing simulator that allows the patient-actor to take on the appearance of a pregnant woman at full term. It features an abdomen that tightens to let the student know when the “patient” is having a contraction, and it’s capable of simulating childbirth.

Another simulator represents a patient who has a tracheostomy. If a student goes too far while suctioning the patient’s airways, the actor will feel a buzz on a wristband to indicate the student has triggered the cough reflex and the actor will cough.

“The technology is just amazing. And it’s constantly improving,” Burke says.

Along with high-tech simulators like mannequins, there are low-tech items, such as modified surgical scrub pants with all of the anatomical features of a woman in labor. A student or patient-actor can put the pants on over their clothes to simulate childbirth.

“We have simulation tools that cost as little as $30 that we know are just as effective an educational tool as our $70,000 mannequins,” Collins says. “They serve very different purposes.”

The Sim Lab will serve students in Loyola’s traditional BSN program for undergraduate students, as well as Loyola’s new accelerated BSN program. Loyola graduate students of various advanced practice nursing specialties also will use the Sim Lab.

Academic partnerships have been key to the growth in the College of Nursing and Health.

Ochsner has partnered with Loyola on its traditional BSN program, as well as the Sim Lab.

With its partnership, Ochsner offers guaranteed clinical placement at its facilities to Loyola’s traditional BSN students. Ochsner also is providing two clinical instructors for Loyola.

Both the traditional and accelerated programs are supported by the Ochsner Scholars initiative, a tuition-assistance program for aspiring nurses, allied health workers, and physicians who pledge to serve as Ochsner employees after completing their education at an accredited school.

Loyola also is partnering with LCMC and other health systems across the state. Loyola nursing students will have access to clinical placements at LCMC-affiliated hospitals, as well as hospitals in Covington, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette.

These types of academic-clinical partnerships are part of a larger trend in academic medicine.

“Up to this point, academic institutions like us had to try to make one-off agreements with every hospital in the region,” Collins says. “As more smaller community hospitals become part of larger regional health systems, the necessity to partner with the larger health systems becomes even more important. The future of academic medicine really is in academic-clinical partnerships.”

Now that the wheels are turning on Loyola’s traditional and accelerated BSN programs, there are more programs on the horizon for the College of Nursing and Health.

“We have only just begun our trajectory of growth,” Collins says. “We are getting these programs going while also thinking through the ideas we have for what we are going to add next.”

The college is working to expand its existing graduate programs to include four new programs.

The School of Nursing is in the pre-accreditation process for two of the programs:

• Nurse Anesthesia

• Nurse-Midwifery

Meanwhile, Loyola has received approval to launch an Adult Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program, and the university will offer Post Master’s Certificates for NurseMidwifery and Adult Gerontological Acute Care Nurse Practitioner.

The personal career experience of Collins and Burke has helped inform the development of the new programs.

“Dr. Burke is a practicing nurse anesthetist; I’m a practicing certified nurse-midwife,” Collins says. “Those are two programs not already here that we knew were very much in demand in the country. It made perfect sense that we should start those, as well as other programs.”

Speaking to nurse-midwifery, Collins says the program will be especially important for Louisiana, which is ranked as the state with the highest rates of maternal and fetal mortality.

“In simplest terms, the state’s poor maternalchild outcomes in pregnancy and birth leave Louisiana as the worst state in which to have a baby,” she says.

That’s especially true for women of color, Collins says, adding that a college-educated woman of color is four to five times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than a high school-educated white woman. This is due to factors like institutional racism and bias, which inhibit women of color from receiving the care that they deserve.

“We could do so much better in Louisiana, especially for women of color,” Collins says. “Creating a nurse-midwifery program here will help us put providers into rural areas of Louisiana where there are currently shortages of qualified providers.”

Looking ahead, Burke says there will be a continued effort to identify nursing education needs and help Loyola’s programs evolve.

“Our goal is to be the No. 1 nursing program in Louisiana — and then the Gulf South,” Dean Collins said. “As we increase our visibility and program offerings, our national ranking will reflect the strong work we have undertaken, as well.”