Practical practice
Student nurses from Mexico get taste of real-life with AWC nursing lab
A group of white-uniformed students comes through the doorway with an instructor. Quiet and respectful, they head off to a set of rooms on the main campus of Arizona Western College in the Yuma foothills.
The group crowds around a hospital bed as a pneumonia patient struggles to breathe, his oxygen saturation dropping into the low 90s. They must assess him and his vitals (pulse, respiratory rate, skin pallor, blood pressure, and more) and make the proper decisions for his acute distress.
Down a beige hallway, a different group prepares to begin intravenous lines on patients with tourniquets, needles, alcohol wipes laid out. Plastic IV bags hang from a central stand, tubing curving off to each arm.
The “patients” and their situations aren’t real (though the needles are), they are all a part of the AWC nursing program’s simulated laboratory classrooms.
Complete with two patient simulation rooms, the lab is equipped with several electronic mannequins, patient beds, charting area, supply carts, medical equipment and instructors. All of it serves to make nursing training more practical for students — and more real, said David Sylvester, director of nursing.
That’s one of the reasons nursing students from all over the region come to train at AWC, including from across the border, Sylvester said.
“Here we can put them in a situation that really tests their ability to prioritize and critically think,” said nursing instructor Emily Adams from the control room, explaining that student nurses training in the field must yield to licensed nurses and physicians when there is a true emergency.
The simulated lab allows students an opportunity to test their own mettle; and they can practice calling in orders to “doctors” in the control room, as they would in an actual setting.
Instructors can record video and audio of students for reviewing after the situation or scenario has been acted out, Adams said, allowing for feedback.
The mannequins are electronic and can mimic almost any symptom or illness. The female mannequin even simulates birth scenarios, which CECATI 52 students found very helpful, said Director Alfredo Valdez.
“That’s amazing, just to have the simulation of the labor,” Valdez said. “That was amazing, even for us.”
It’s a practice day for eight students of the nursing assistant program at CECATI 52 a technical school in Morelos, Mexico, a short hop southwest of Los Algodones, where students and adults can take classes to learn a trade.
“I feel like I’m dreaming really, because it’s a (very) different school from what we have in Mexico,” student Marina Carvajal said of being on the AWC campus. “I think it’s a big opportunity for us to come, and we are very thankful.”
Most of CECATI 52’s nursing students are younger than 15, as the program is aimed at those in the junior high grades (in Mexico, that is considered 7th-9th grades), but it is in some ways similar to career and technical education programs on the community college level, Valdez said.
Students take instruction about 55 hours a week, and work 10 hours in an outside setting. They start out learning vitals and how to move patients before moving on to more complex procedures. Students further along in the program do 55 instructional hours and 150 hours, whether it is a nursing home, hospice or drug rehabilitation center. Students in the final phase do 300 hours in a hospital setting.
CECATI 52’s three-yearold nursing program, in which students earn a nursing assistant certificate in a two-year format that is four modules, is very popular, Valdez noted, with people driving from Mexicali to attend.
“This a short program, a two-year program, and you don’t need a bachelor degree,” Valdez explained. “So people from Mexicali drive an hour to Morelos every day to have the classes.”
The laboratory classroom at AWC also helps prepare students for scenarios and situations they will face in health career jobs. So far, CECATI 52 has brought 80 beginner students and a high level class.
“That’s why we bring the students here to see how they do it outside of our school,” Valdez said. “So they’d have the chance to learn how they do things in a real hospital.”