Nursing students join vaccine push
Dozens help administer COVID-19 shots to those eligible in Riverside and SB counties
Mark Sandoval can’t recall when exactly the thought popped into his head, or even how long it stayed there, but at one point during his eight-plus hours at the Human Resources Test Center in San Bernardino County on Thursday, it hit him.
He, in his second semester of nursing school, was responsible for inoculating hundreds against the novel coronavirus.
Sandoval, a first-year student at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, is one of dozens of Inland Empire and Los Angeles County nursing students helping administer precious doses of both COVID-19 vaccines to those eligible in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
Back at his Los Angeles home Thursday evening after working his first vaccination site, the exhausted 33-year-old, who started at WesternU in the fall, reflected on where he had arrived in six short months.
“I couldn’t have imagined I’d have been in this role,” he said.
As San Bernardino County started receiving doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna
COVID-19 vaccines late last year, health officials and local providers turned to nursing students from across the region to help get shots in health care workers’ arms as quickly as possible.
Plucked from virtual classrooms and campus labs, some volunteered, while others joined the cause as part of their studies.
Each ultimately played a pivotal role in immunizing a region drowning in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths at the time.
Neighboring Riverside County also intended to use nursing students to bolster vaccination efforts, Jose Arballo, a spokesman for the county health department, said Friday, but temporary employees from out of state came in to fill the job at county-run sites.
“We’ll more than likely use them in the future,” Aballo noted, “because the temporary workers will be leaving, and we’ll still have demand for vaccinations for months and months.”
Dr. Tammy Vant Hul, dean of the Riverside City College School of Nursing, said recently her students have been on call since vaccines became widely available in the Inland Empire. RCC students will continue to help inoculate local front-line workers in Redlands and Riverside when hospitals have the supply, she said.
“We are preparing our students from day one that we are in historical times, and they have a huge responsibility to pitch in,” Vant Hul said. “I’ve listened to some of the state reports from other [health care] directors, and they’re saying we have to protect our students and faculty. They’re nurses, we have to arm them.
“It’s like going to war almost,” she added. “You want to send soldiers who are prepared and appropriately armed, and we’re doing the same thing. We’ve gotten nothing but compliments about how professional our students and faculty are. I’ve told them, ‘This is monumental.’ ”
Jenna Lee, a 24-year-old international nursing student at RCC, has twice lent a hand at Redlands Community Hospital, administering about 150 shots to nurses, doctors, therapists and people 65 and older.
With her classes forced online due to the pandemic, the alumna of King High School in Riverside hadn’t administered a shot of any kind before doing so late last month.
But that’s why she volunteered, she said. You can only learn so much in an online environment.
“I just observed the nurse give shots to the first two people and then I did the third,” Lee said. “The nurse guided me through the whole process. It wasn’t too bad. After one shot, I got used to it. It was fun.
“Being a health care worker, everything’s so new to me because I’d never worked in a health care setting before,” Lee continued, “I’ve never imagined working during a pandemic, so I’m getting used to it.”
For a while now, WesternU and San Bernardino County have had a working partnership where nursing students rotate through the county’s Department of Public Health for clinical experience, said Dr. Ruth Trudgeon, an assistant professor in the College of Graduate Nursing.
Now, Trudgeon added, the private Pomona university can repay the favor by providing extra sets of hands.
“It’s a win-win situation,” she said.
During flu season, a number of WesternU students help Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties administer flu shots. And because all intramuscular injections follow the same principles, these COVID-19 vaccination clinics are “just an extension of those, though maybe on a bigger scale,” Trudgeon said.
“One thing that’s different,” she added, “is the students will be busier. But that’s something they’re prepared for, and they’re happy to practice.”
In addition to WesternU, San Bernardino County has welcomed nursing students from Azusa Pacific University and West Coast University in Rancho Cucamonga, county spokesman David Wert said recently.
County officials also have contacted Cal State Fullerton, Loma Linda University and other schools for assistance.
Nursing students have supplemented health care workers at recent supersites, helping inoculate thousands.
“When the vaccine comes in,” Vant Hul said, “entities want to get it out.”
WesternU’s graduate nursing program attracts students from all walks of life, Trudgeon said.
No matter their background or prior areas of study, the accelerated program requires these aspiring nurses get in and start learning fast, Trudgeon added, beginning with injections and other health care fundamentals.
As efforts to vaccinate Riverside and San Bernardino counties expand, this generation of nursing students is putting its collective dexterity to good use.
“I didn’t imagine being a part of something like this. Never in a lifetime,” said Sandoval, who graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 2012 with a degree in kinesiology. “Even when I started nursing school in August, I didn’t imagine it would be like us actually being on the front lines administering vaccines and doing testing. To say the least, I’m grateful for the experience.”