In December of 2020, the GW School of Nursing’s Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement co-hosted1 a follow up to last year’s inaugural Media Summit for Nursing Organizations. The goal of the Media Summit is to improve the representation of nurses in the media.
This work took on greater urgency over the past year, during which time the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated healthcare and the media. Nurses may have been featured in the media more than in years past, but often they were portrayed as heroes, angels, victims, or strictly bedside caregivers. Despite the fact that nurses are also thought leaders, scholars, innovators, policy influencers, and the backbone of healthcare systems, nurses and nursing organizations are still rarely the go-to for the science and evidence. Nurses have valuable knowledge, unique perspectives, and stories that deserve to be told and represented in the media.
The 2020 Media Summit convened leaders from 20 nursing organizations seeking to improve the representation of nurses in the media and enhance their media engagement skills. The participants discussed challenges and successes they have had implementing lessons from last year’s Summit. Some nursing organization representatives said they have noticed a trend of media requests seeking to portray nurses in a stereotypical manner. Others, who had success building relationships with journalists since the previous Summit, suggested that once your organization has a connection with journalists, you can begin to redirect their questions, pivoting away from discussing only bedside care to discussing the ways in which nurses are well-rounded leaders, in healthcare and policy.
At the 2020 Media Summit, we also hosted two journalists: Sheree Crute, director of communications at the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, and Courtney Stewart, vice president of strategic communications at Missouri Foundation for Health. These esteemed panelists advised our nursing leaders on many media topics, including how to navigate the current polarized media environment.
Sheree Crute told attendees that “sitting comfortably in the center is almost not possible,” so to consider, what are you willing to say and what you are willing to be known for. As she stated, “nurses have important stories. Finding people who can tell them factually, effectually, and efficiently is the challenge.”
To have the greatest impact, Ms. Stewart advised the diverse group to hone in on their organization’s specific audiences based on their niche or comparative advantage. Responding to the many participants who expressed wanting to see the underrepresentation of nurses and the media’s narrative around nurses change, she said that journalists do have a responsibility in this, including educating themselves on better understanding the complex roles of nurses. However, it is also partially up to nurses and nursing organizations to make themselves known, pivot the narrative, share unlikely stories, and come up with creative ways to enter conversations. She told our attendees to build relationships with journalists now, even in small ways, and that those relationships are what will, down the road, make the more in-depth healthcare and health policy conversations that nurses want to have possible.
1. The Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement looks forward to continuing these conversations and partnerships in 2021.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the world in many ways, it has also fueled innovation and inspired resilience among many sectors of society. One of the many ways our GW Nursing community has been adaptive is through enhanced teaching methods, a prime example being the policy course, NURS 6205 – Health Policy, Quality, and Political Process. This course is designed to orient both master’s and undergraduate students to the policy environment, connect the dots between policy and health care quality, introduce the political process, and encourage students to be advocates.
In years past, one of the major assignments was for each student to contact their federal or state representative and dialogue with them about a specific policy issue. However, in the summer of 2020, COVID-19 had thrown Capitol Hill into chaos and the demands of legislating at that time were all consuming for members of Congress and Hill staff. Realizing this, one of the course professors, Ellen Kurtzman, created an alternative way to enhance students’ education while not inundating Hill staff with calls. Students were given options to either proceed with having a dialogue with a representative, join a virtual lobby day, or engage with a Hill staffer in a virtual Q&A session.
Q&A with a Hill Staffer
Dr. Ellen Kurtzman, Ph.D., MPH, RN, FAAN, a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Fellow, used her contacts to recruit guest lecturers from Congressional offices. This provided students with the opportunity to interact with someone working on Capitol Hill while being sensitive to the dramatic political climate. Dr. Kurtzman said that the experience was both useful and inspiring because each staffer who chose to give these lectures and talk to students, did so out of a passion for inspiring nurses to be engaged in policy.
This option, which many students chose, provided an opportunity to learn why each staffer picked this career and what, in their backgrounds and experience, led them to Capitol Hill. They were able to dialogue with students about the most pressing issues in Congress (the 116th), how to be an effective advocate, and how to best interact with a lawmaker.
When asked about the decision to host these Q&A sessions, and what that experience was like, Dr. Kurtzman explained that the staffers who spoke were policy generalists and their job depends on constituents coming to tell them what is important to their stakeholder group or using their expertise to help them interpret a bill. Dr. Kurtzman summed up the message to students as “we can’t do our job without you, so coming to visit shouldn’t be intimidating.”
With regard to the interview sessions, Dr. Joyce Pulcini, Ph.D., RN, PNP-BC, FAAN – the course coordinator – stated that the helpfulness lies in getting instructions and encouragement directly from staffers; helping students to “break the fear” of talking to legislators. She said that based on student feedback, this assignment gave them a sense of what advocacy is – that the term finally began to “become real and come alive for them.” Dr. Kurtzman agreed by saying that these extra training sessions are an important piece of the training puzzle if we are to expect students to advocate or approach their representatives on their own.
In the spring 2021 semester, Dr. Melissa Batchelor, Ph.D., RN-BC, FNP-BC, FGSA, FAAN, a former Health and Aging Policy Fellow, set up the interview session with Hill staffers. Dr. Pulcini noted how unique and extremely helpful it is to have multiple faculty members “who have worked on the Hill and know the players.”
Lobby Day
The lobby days, the other option provided, were also very successful with the students. Virginia hosted a virtual lobby day this semester, free and specific to students, that they were encouraged to attend. Maryland hosted a similar virtual lobby day option, too. Dr. Pulcini noted that these virtual sessions are another COVID-19 related innovation – stemming from necessity – but have allowed for much higher participation rates, including among our students, who might not have otherwise traveled to the state capitals to participate.
This past year has been a crucial and dynamic time for nursing legislation, particularly at the state levels. For one, scope of practice laws are finally changing in many states like Virginia because of COVID-19. Between this and the fact that most nurses will end up conducting state level (rather than federal) political advocacy, these opportunities for students to get state lobbying experience has been invaluable.
Dr. Pulcini said that these virtual options will become a regular part of the course because they provide expanded opportunities and meaningful interaction for our students.
Why this is unique and innovative
GW Nursing is uniquely situated with the right environment, context, and connections to allow for this type of innovative educational experience to exist. This “Only at GW” opportunity enables students to learn from Hill staffers and begin to immerse themselves in the legislative process.
Dr. Kurtzman credits her time as a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowwith her ability to bring this opportunity to students. Her goal during her fellowship was to absorb as much as she could and translate and disseminate the lessons learned into her classroom teaching. She is proud to have been able to enhance the experience of her students and leverage her year on the Hill to inform her teaching.
Gregg Margolis, Director of the RWJF Health Policy Fellows Program, said that this innovation is a great example of how he hopes and expects alumni, like Dr. Kurtzman, to share their experience once they return to their teaching positions. He said that because many policy makers “lack the perspective of frontline providers,” it is “important for students and clinical workers to engage with them.” He added that it is equally important that they learn how to do it effectively, though.
The student perspective
One of our former nursing students, Mehdi Rahmati, now a cardiac nurse at GW Hospital, took this course with Dr. Kurtzman in the summer semester and attended the Q&A session with legislative correspondent, Shivani Pampati. About this experience, Mehdi said:
“It allowed us to learn and know how legislatures would like to connect with healthcare workers and what avenues are more effective. The interaction [of hearing from and speaking with the Hill staffer] also helped break down the walls of pessimism and hesitation that some of us had in contacting a senator. Knowing that not only can our voice be heard, but that we, as healthcare providers, can serve as a resource to the legislatures was eye opening.”
When asked how his time at GW Nursing as a whole influenced his understanding of policy, he said that he now has an appreciation for how policy is woven into everything and how important it is to nursing…
“… especially during the current pandemic. In this course, we were discussing policies every class, but I appreciated the discourse with other professors and the administration about the importance of healthcare policies and their impact on nursing. How, for instance, the government drafted policies to fight the pandemic that directly impacted nurses and healthcare workers. We learned that now, more than ever, we as nurses should take great interest in policy work, otherwise policies will be drafted without our input, and those policies will directly change our day-to-day work at the hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, and elsewhere. “
**A special thank you to NURS 6205’s guest speakers from the Hill: Shivani Pampati (legislative correspondent), McKenzie Fields (legislative aide), Alexander Urry (policy advisor), and Samantha Koehler (policy aide).
As they undertake research they hope will translate to better patient outcomes and health care practices, GW Nursing’s first-ever Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing students are setting a high bar for those who will come after them.
The Ph.D. program launched in fall 2019. Although GW Nursing had already offered a doctoral-level degree–the Doctor of Nursing Practice (D.N.P.)–the Ph.D. program aims to prepare students interested in nursing science and education.
“Upon graduation, a nurse scientist will address research questions that are most relevant to the care of patients, educational needs of students and policy goals of our profession,” said Kathleen Griffith, Ph.D., M.P.H., CRNP-F, assistant dean of the Ph.D. program and newly minted associate dean for research. “Nurses study clinical problems that we are in a unique position to manage–such as symptom management, family distress and decision making around preventive health care. The purpose of our research is to build the knowledge base of our profession, which will enhance our care of patients, improve education of our students and change the way health care is delivered.”
Eleven students, each with a range of experiences in nursing and health care, are currently enrolled in the three-year, full-time 57-credit program, which is delivered in an executive-style format.
The six students in the first cohort are now completing their core coursework; the second cohort, with five students, started in fall 2020. A third cohort will have an orientation in July and begin studies in the fall semester, Dr. Griffith said.
First cohort students Michelle Clausen, M.S.N., CNM, and Noelle Herrier, PMHNP, have centered their research on improving outcomes for two populations that too often slip through the cracks.
Michelle Clausen, GW Nursing Ph. D. student
After earning her undergraduate degree in public health from GW and then working at a Washington, D.C., area health-focused nonprofit, Clausen returned to GW, first earning a B.S.N. and then an M.S.N. with a concentration in nurse-midwifery.
She started her nursing career as a Midwifery Fellow and then as a full-time faculty member at the midwifery service at GW Medical Faculty Associates. These roles also came with the opportunity to teach students–from those in medical and nursing school to emerging midwives and medical residents—which has become another passion for Clausen. Since beginning her Ph.D. studies, Clausen has continued to work clinically as a nurse-midwife for the University of Maryland.
Clausen’s clinical experiences motivated her to return to school and is the inspiration behind her research focus.
“I have witnessed the system fall short for women and pregnant persons,” she said. “I’ve seen barriers that certified nurse-midwives have faced in providing high-quality, evidence-based compassionate care, despite this type of care continuously providing significant outcomes.”
On the other hand, she has had the opportunity, through mentors and other experiences, to see midwifery at its very best.
Clausen’s research interests include matters related to the nation’s growing maternal morbidity and mortality rates; barriers to access to care; innovations in women’s health; and the vast spiritual needs of pregnant individuals. She is now focused on testing spiritual needs assessment tools with pregnant women.
“Spiritual health has been studied throughout medicine and associated with various positive health outcomes, and I would like to help bring this to those experiencing pregnancy,” she said. “It is my hope that this work informs future research regarding the dynamic needs of pregnant individuals in order to improve their health and the health of their families.”
Noelle Herrier, GW Nursing Ph. D. student
After 13 years in clinical practice, Herrier has returned to school, hopeful that she can play a greater part in eliminating the health disparities common among mental health patients.
Though her undergraduate degree from Northern Arizona University is in zoology, Herrier minored in chemistry with an emphasis on health professions. She returned to school to earn a B.S.N. from Arizona State and then an M.S.N. in Adult Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner at the University of Washington. There, Herrier did much of her training at Madigan Army Medical Center, focusing on the neurobiology and treatment of trauma. She now works at a Maricopa County, ArIzona, facility, providing court-ordered evaluations and treatment for those with mental health concerns.
Her nursing career started in cardiac ICU, but mental health was always Herrier’s passion; she made time to pursue it by working with community mental health initiatives and at inpatient behavioral health facilities.
“Throughout my career, I found that there were many barriers to my patients receiving medical care, from their psychiatric illness to their social and living situations, and I’ve even witnessed provider bias in delaying treatment,” she said.
Herrier wants to use her Ph.D. to help change that. She says symptoms of other diseases are often overlooked in mental health patients, something that was underscored this past year, she says, as mental health patients with severe coughs were tested for COVID-19 only to discover they had advanced lung cancer.
“The understanding that people with a serious mental illness have higher rates of mortality from cancer than those without a mental illness led me to want to research to find methods to decrease people’s mortality,” said Herrier, whose post-doctoral aspirations include joining the faculty of a university to teach and continue her research.
Cohort 2 students Sasha DuBois, RN, M.S.N., and Burton Korer, RN-BC, D.N.P., CPHQ, have designs on using their research to change the health care industry for the better.
Sasha DuBois, GW Nursing Ph.D. student
DuBois was in high school when she first came to work at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Today, she is a nurse director for the hospital’s IV team and Patient Care Assistant Float Pool.
“I started out through the Student Success Jobs Program for Boston students who were interested in health careers,” said DuBois, who joined the hospital’s nursing staff after earning a B.S.N. at Simmons University.
She received her M.S.N. in leadership and administration from Emmanuel College; she’s pursuing her doctorate because she believes it will be a valuable asset in her goal of addressing the dearth of diversity and cultural competency in nursing.
“Ensuring we have racially and culturally concordant providers of our patients is a very important passion of mine,” she said. “My research interests around this subject are focused on barriers that nurses of color face when completing a professional nursing program.”
For DuBois, nursing is more than a profession, it’s a calling that beckoned to her early on. The pandemic, she says, has shown the world once again how critically important nurses are. She’s never been prouder to work in the field.
“I love what makes a nurse, a nurse,” DuBois said.
She’s determined to leave a mark: to make nursing better by working to knock down barriers that impede both nurses and patients. DuBois has begun that work already by volunteering at Simmons University in the Dotson Bridge and Mentoring Program, which supports African American, Latina, Asian and Native American nursing students.
“I believe that there is room for everyone at the table,” DuBois said. “I plan to continue my career in nursing leadership while working in academia. I can do my part to bridge the two worlds, so I may contribute to the development of the best nurses for tomorrow.”
The COVID-19 crisis has brought the vulnerability of older adults to the forefront, but Dr. Korer says this population was in a precarious situation long before the pandemic. He enrolled in the Ph.D. program to help change that.
“I see many elderly low-income individuals at risk due to declining health and limited access to coordinated and effective care,” he said. “My aim is to help develop nursing practices to address elderly individuals who are aging in place in senior housing.”
Years of study and practice led him to his research focus. He worked continuously in health care as he earned his A.D.N. from Gateway Community College; B.S. in business administration and management and M.S.N. from University of Phoenix; and D.N.P. from GW.
“Starting as a CNA, then an LPN, I have been employed in nursing full time for over 30 years, working for several large employers, and have owned my own health care company for more than 25 years,” he said.
Dr. Korer believes one of the first steps in delivering better health outcomes for older adults and others is to ensure the right programs and initiatives are properly funded and utilized.
“The health care system in the United States currently covers many social costs as compared to other countries (but doesn’t) always produce favorable health care outcomes,” he said. “If we can spend the resources better we can improve the lives of many more individuals.”
After completing the program, Dr. Korer wants to share what he learns about fiscal performance and health care outcomes through teaching, lecturing and partnerships with hospitals and other health-focused organizations.
The student-run COVID-19 testing center, which got up and running in record time, offers an inspiring blueprint for the future, nursing experts say.
When Mark Tanner came to GW’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus weekly to get tested for COVID-19, the former assistant dean for the bachelor of science in nursing program parked adjacent to Enterprise Hall. He entered the building, scanned his GW badge, and walked up to the registration desk, where nursing students scannedQR codes on testees’ phones to call up their appointments, verify names and birth dates, and scan test tubes that would contain their samples. From behind plexiglass, the students—who were gloved and masked—wrote Dr. Tanner’s name and birth date on the test tube and verified his identity with his GW ID or license.
Dr. Tanner took his test tube and walked down a hall in the building’s former cafeteria, which was sufficiently capacious to accommodate the center, to one of six testing booths. If it was a busy time of day, he could wait a few minutes, but often he went right in. He would hand his test tube to the nursing student (gowned, gloved, and clad in an N95 mask and face shield), and the latter verified his birth date. Dr. Tanner had taught many of these students in first-semester didactic courses, but the students would invariably stick to protocol.
“Every experience I had, they always ask, ‘Hey. How are you? Have you done this before?’ even though they knew who I am, and they knew I’d done it before,” he said. “They’re doing the things that they should be doing. They’re neither relaxing nor taking anything off. There’s a sense of pride knowing they’ve come to our program; they’ve come this far; and they’re doing well with this very important task.
Each time, the student explained the procedure to Dr. Tanner, directed him to sit and drop his mask below his nose, and swabbed 10 seconds per nostril. The student nurse placed the swab in the test tube, broke it off and capped it, and then Dr. Tanner was ready to go. A courier picked up samples twice daily from the site, at noon and at 4 p.m., for delivery to Foggy Bottom for processing in a GW lab. Dr. Tanner usually had his results, which he could check via a mobile application, within about a day.
“It’s been very well and smoothly run,” he said. “I’m rarely there for longer than 5 to 10 minutes from the time I stand in line until the time I’m back in my car.” There’s a huge amount that happens in a very short clip, and the testing center did that more than 500 times per week at its peak. But equally as impressive is the speed with which the COVID-19 testing center was created and launched and how effective it has been during these difficult and uncertain times.
Dr. Karen Drenkard
An ‘Aha Moment’
When GW announced in March 2020 that it would be going virtual, the School of Nursing was already well poised for online instruction, which it had been doing previously, but clinical placements became a problem when area hospitals said they couldn’t accommodate student-nurses. The Commonwealth of Virginia ruled that simulations could count for clinical experience, so that semester’s students could graduate.
“But then the new group comes in. What do you do with the new group? Summer, fall, and now spring. We really were beginning to scramble a little bit,” said Karen Drenkard, associate dean of clinical practice and community engagement.
By early summer, Dr. Drenkard was representing the Nursing School on GW’s pandemic task force and was co-running the task force’s health and wellness subcommittee. As the university moved toward bringing essential community members back to campus, there was a need for a COVID-19 surveillance polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing program. Two testing centers were created in Foggy Bottom—one for symptomatic and the other for non-symptomatic people—and by mid-August, Dr. Drenkard had a mandate to create and operate a testing center on the Virginia campus for the 550 faculty, staff, and students, who reported there for work.
“I’m not sure when we had the aha moment, but it’s 25 miles away, and the students have their clinical labs in Ashburn, the employees work in Ashburn, and we have housekeeping staff, faculty, students, and essential staff that are all going to be there,” Dr. Drenkard said.
The semester was slated to begin some two or three weeks after the Nursing School received direction to start the testing center, so Dr. Drenkard—who had only been at GW for about a year—needed to move very quickly. The former chief nurse who spent a decade at the five hospitals of the Inova Health System, had served also on the Northern Virginia regional emergency preparedness disaster task force for the hospital alliance right after September 11, 2001.
“I had a lot of disaster management experience, and I had operations experience,” she said.
Dr. Drenkard corralled a group, which included people she hadn’t met before and who hadn’t met one another, and oriented everyone toward the goal and looming deadlines. “We were able to break down a lot of barriers very quickly,” she said. She also brought aboard two people with whom she had worked previously and upon whom she knew she could count.
She enlisted Bonnie Sakallaris—who was chief nurse of the Alexandria, Va., hospital system and had worked with Dr. Drenkard at Inova—as the COVID-19 testing center director. “She was thinking that she was going to retire. I called her on Aug. 12 and said, ‘Would you be interested in doing this with me? I have no idea how long it’s going to last, but it’s going to be crazy. Do you want to come with me?’” Dr. Drenkard said. “She called me back in two hours and said, ‘Yes. I do.’”
“When you’re a nursing executive or a hospital administrator in the executive suite, you stand up new programs frequently, and often without a whole lot of notice. I had never opened up a testing center before, but both Karen and I have on multiple occasions, with very little notice, developed a whole new program, staffed it, and opened it up,” Dr. Sakallaris said. “There are organizational things that you know you have to do. This was not foreign territory.”
Dr. Drenkard also hired Patsy Deyo, M.S.N. ’14—who is in her Ph.D. dissertation phase in translational health sciences at GW’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and who worked previously in academic affairs at the Nursing School—to run student-nurse educational training.
“I knew we could do it. I wasn’t sure how,” Deyo said with a laugh. “There were so many moving pieces and so many different things that had to happen in such a short time that anywhere along the lines there could have been hiccups that would have impacted our being able to do it.”
The group secured supplies (including the highest level of personal protective equipment, PPE, that it could to protect the student nurses), drafted colleagues from different parts of the university, and found ways to involve students. (It also created and ran a flu vaccination clinic adjacent to the COVID testing center, as a “one-stop shop,” for two weeks in October.)
“I said, ‘If I’m going to put students who aren’t licensed yet in a situation where they’re exposed to some people who could possibly have COVID, they have to have N95s, face shields, gowns, and nitrile gloves,” Dr. Drenkard said. “We used very stringent infection control, and none of my testers ever got COVID.”
From the start, staff members were very open with the student nurses, asking how the process could improve and what challenges could be foretold and skirted. “We kept modifying what we did based on what they were seeing and said, ‘No idea was too crazy or far-out to try,’” Dr. Sakallaris said.
Students have expressed to Dr. Sakallaris something quite similar to how she feels herself: that as the pandemic unfolded, she felt drawn to the front lines to do something useful and to be part of the solution.
“This offers that opportunity,” she said. “It’s very gratifying to know that you’re doing something really important to manage and eventually stop this pandemic. That feels really good. It’s fun to see a plan come together.”
And though the group went into creating the clinic expecting there would be great lessons but also initial glitches, the process went surprisingly smoothly from the start, according to Dr. Sakallaris. “There was no chaos,” she said. “It was all really well controlled.”
Nursing student volunteers in PPE receiving instructions
Charge Nurse
Throughout the day—10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Mondays and Thursdays, and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays—student nurses rotate through three roles: registrar, tester, and charge nurse. One student is charge nurse in the morning, and another takes over after lunch. That person is in charge of ensuring the center has adequate inventory and supplies, oversees lunches and breaks, and enforces social distancing and masking protocols in the center. She or he also delivers test samples to the courier for transport to the Foggy Bottom lab.
Veronica Nguyen—who worked at the testing center during the spring 2021 semester—found it nerve wracking the first time she served as charge nurse. Only one other student from her group had held the charge nurse position before, and Nguyen trained with Dr. Sakallaris and with that previous charge nurse.
“You worry about keeping everyone happy and running daily operations as smoothly as you can,” Nguyen said. “Especially for someone with limited leadership experience, it can be daunting to delegate tasks and make decisions. However, developing my leadership skills in a setting like the testing center was incredibly helpful.”
Faculty provided a safe learning environment to facilitate student growth and development, and debrief sessions at the end of the day helped the team address collectively issues that arose during the day. “This time allowed me to reflect on my role and work with my peers to improve,” Nguyen said. “I’m thankful that the testing center created this role. These experiences can help us develop our leadership style and practice as we go into our jobs as full-time nurses.”
Working at the testing center also helped Nguyen bridge the gap between didactic knowledge and practical nursing skills. “The testing site represents a crossroads of our nursing education, training, and experiences at clinical. At the center, we can practice practical skills like properly donning and doffing PPE, participate in patient education, and learn among peers,” she said. “The testing site offers opportunities for team management and building leadership skills.”
Another student nurse who worked at the testing center spring 2021, Timothy Barksdale, also found that the experience connected directly to what he was learning in his classes. “I am learning about COVID procedures in all my clinicals and classes, so the PPE requirements and general knowledge is very intertwined,” he said. “This clinical has absolutely raised my confidence in patient care as a whole and with COVID specific protocols.”
When Seneka Lea worked at the center during that same semester, she discovered there’s a lot more to the center than just swabbing noses and scanning test tubes.
“I was surprised at the number of individuals tested at the Virginia campus everyday, and then more so at the Foggy Bottom campus. Before my experience, these numbers didn’t really mean anything to me,” she said. “But in understanding the importance of surveillance and contact tracing on preventing outbreaks in our GW community, it is impressive to see how many individuals we test on a weekly basis.”
Lea learned something different from each of the three roles at the testing center. As a tester, she learned to ensure sample quality and to reassure patients (nasal swabs aren’t fun, she assures). As registrar, she fine-tuned customer service skills and attention to detail. And as charge nurse, she learned the importance of teamwork and assuming responsibility.
Normally—when it’s not a pandemic—student nurses don’t get a lot of primary care experience, because their clinical experiences tend to focus on acute care.
“This is a real chance for them to see how a primary care, very-specialized clinic works, and to see all the roles that go into making it happen. It gives a different experience than we’ve been able to provide in the past, and it really allows them to understand the full picture of what’s going on,” Dr. Tanner said. “It’s a hopefully once in a lifetime opportunity to work through a pandemic and to provide this service.”
Nursing student volunteer wiping down chair
Student Innovations
In addition to their assigned roles as registrar, tester, and charge nurse, students also kept their eyes and ears open and made an impact on important parts of the testing center processes, center staff said.
One nursing student read the label on a sanitizer bottle and questioned testers taking the swabbed specimens where they needed to go and only then coming back and sanitizing chairs. The instructions said the sanitizer had to sit for a minute before cleaning to be effective. After the student approached staff with that realization, the center process changed. Now, testers spray the chair and let the sanitizer sit while they deliver the specimen. By testers’ return, the sanitizer has done its magic and is ready to be wiped down.
On another occasion, students got the idea to help Spanish-speaking facilities and housekeeping staff on the Virginia campus understand more about COVID in their mother tongue. One of the students, who was fluent in Spanish, provided the text for the educational materials. “The students felt that it was very important to do this project,” Deyo said. “It was so well received.”
“The students were really picking up on knowledge deficits among groups of people coming in to get tested and were able to put together educational materials to address that,” Dr. Tanner said. “They served a really good role. They were the ones who noticed that and brought it to the faculty, who were overseeing and working with them.”
In another instance, students suggested minimizing the distance between the donning and doffing site and testing booths, so they wouldn’t have to walk through the entire testing center in full PPE. A new, closer space was identified, with the students’ help, and students set it up, sanitized it, and arranged supplies, Deyo said.
In normal times, students have less of an opportunity to bring fresh sets of eyes and ears in their clinicals and to provide feedback that revolutionizes processes, according to Dr. Tanner.
“Absolutely, there are people who may have those ideas, but the nature of this being a new clinic, really gave them more a sense of freedom to go ahead and say, ‘Hey. I’m seeing this,’” he said. “When you’re a student and you’re going into a well-established clinical site, you see something, but you may wonder why they do that. You may ask that question, but it’s not going to be very typical—I certainly know that as a student I wouldn’t have felt comfortable being like, ‘Hey. You guys should change this.’”
Nursing student administering flu vaccine
Looking Ahead
As Dr. Drenkard thinks back on all that GW was able to accomplish with its COVID testing, she thinks the university sits squarely in the top tier of those who showed leadership in pandemic management and surveillance. “The capacity to stand something up quickly and to use students who are in clinical training as a resource—these are all really important assets,” she said.
Dr. Drenkard also thinks that the testing center broadcasts an important and broad message about nursing. “As a profession, we’ve struggled a little bit to really shine as leaders, and this was an example of a combination of so many things going together,” she said. “Nursing and nurses taking on leadership and a nurse-led testing site and center shows what can happen and shows people what nurses are capable of.”
There will almost certainly be testing in some form over the summer, and the hope is that need will greatly reduce by the fall.
Now that COVID vaccinations are more prominent, the testing center has shifted to reduced hours. But there is still a potential role the center will play in vaccinations going forward.
It was able to do that with a flu vaccine clinic that the Nursing School stood up adjacent to the COVID-19 testing center, which provided flu vaccines in two weeks to everyone reporting to the Virginia campus who wasn’t already vaccinated. “The thing that we could really look at and see how we can incorporate is working on vaccination clinics,” Dr. Tanner said.
“It’s great to know we can do it on such a short time frame and make it effective. We hope that we don’t have to do it again that quickly,” he said of the COVID testing center. “Academics are made to move kind of slow and deliberate; it’s not the same thing as the clinical environment. But knowing that we were able to do that is a great thing to know and if we have a similar situation—which goodness I hope we don’t—it’s great to know that we were able to do that.”
Dr. Sakallaris agreed. “There’s going to be another crisis at some point, so this is the lesson that I would take away from that: When there’s a crisis looming, take a look at what your students can do, what can they learn from this, and how can we marry those two things. I think that’s been the most valuable thing,” she said.
“When there is a crisis, when there is something new going on, it’s a significant opportunity for learning for your students. Use that. Staffing this with student nurses is unique,” she added. “Other places have tested college students, but they’ve used contract labor and that sort of thing. I don’t know of any other place that has used their student nurses.”
And, of course, their flu vaccination clinic is likely to return in future flu seasons, as it has operated in the past. “It is a really good opportunity for student nurses to do IM (intramuscular) injections,” Deyo said.
What a difference a year makes. To think, at this time last year we were hunkering down amidst the initial spikes in COVID-19 cases. We were reeling from the unthinkable killing of George Floyd. We were swiftly transitioning in-person to virtual education and finding new, creative…sometimes challenging and painful…ways of navigating our new realities.
While we’re not out of the woods, yet…we find ourselves a year later entering a place of relief, reflection and recovery. Healthcare workers have done the amazing work of educating communities and vaccinating more than 60% of adults and adolescents, leading to reduced COVID cases and deaths each month and relaxed restrictions on mask wearing and social distancing. We saw the criminal justice system work the way it should, holding accountable those who have done wrong. And we find our school of nursing on the precipice of transition as I prepare to embark on my next adventure at Vanderbilt School of Nursing and Interim Dean Pam Slaven-Lee takes the helm with a newly-minted four-year strategic plan and the support of a dynamic leadership team, faculty and staff.
As I reflect on my six years at GW Nursing, it is with such joy and satisfaction at the things we’ve accomplished together and the progress we’ve made. It has been such an amazing chapter of my life. And this last year, in particular, has been a reminder of all that is possible working with the talented faculty, staff, students, alumni, friends and donors of the GW School of Nursing.
Last August, as the COVID pandemic raged on, we saw the GW School of Nursing take the lead in planning, building and running a highly effective COVID-19 testing and vaccination clinic that served as an invaluable learning experience for A.B.S.N. students, while providing a vital healthcare service for the GW community. We saw faculty embrace the “silver linings” of online learning to breathe new life into courses. And we saw our community come together, virtually, for milestone events like our 10th anniversary gala, the inaugural GW Digital Health Summit, and our second annual Media Summit, to name a few.
This year has also brought a renewed focus on research at GW Nursing with the influx of more than $1.5 million in funding for projects ranging from how to reduce maternal mortality, to ways of mitigating liver disease, to strategies for improving clinical operations aboard military ships during a pandemic. We also have two cohorts of Ph.D. students working toward becoming the next wave of groundbreaking researchers in areas such as addressing the lack of quality care for pregnant persons, disparities in healthcare treatment among mental health patients, the dearth of diversity and cultural competency in nursing, and how to ensure better health outcomes for older adults.
We have also found time this year to engage with our alumni and celebrate their accomplishments, as you’ll see in our highlights of Dr. Valerie Strockbine and GW Monumental Alumna Dr. Mary-Michael Brown.
This has been an unprecedented year, filled with challenges, opportunities, successes and failures. But, above all, our GW Nursing community stayed true to itself, supported each other and found a path forward. This issue aims to capture some of that strength, resilience, innovation and tenacity. Please enjoy our spring issue.
Pamela R. Jeffries Ph.D., RN, FAAN, ANEF, FSSH Dean | School of Nursing The George Washington University
