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Nursing students on the frontline |
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Written by Sherri Gallant
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Sunday, November 08 2009, 10:26 PM |
As professors in the faculty of health sciences, Sharon Yanicki and Bernie Wojtowicz couldn’t have asked for better field experience than the H1N1 outbreak for their nursing students.
Students have been conscripted to help with the vaccine rollout and have gained invaluable insight not possible in a classroom setting.
“It’s been an absolutely wonderful learning experience,” said Wojtowicz, practice course co-ordinator in the School of Health Sciences.
“It’s not only enhanced their own learning about the public health issues, but it enhances their clinical skills. We’ve had over 100 students actively participating in administering and teaching about the vaccine at the mass clinics. As well there’s been a teaching experience for them because they learn about it and then they’re able to communicate the issues and the implications, side effects, and other information to the public.
“They may not have been exposed to that kind of practice during the course of their regular schooling. It’s been a wonderful partnership with Alberta Health Services and the administration in Health Services here at the university. They’ve been able to work with their soon-to-be peers in a very supportive environment.”
Being on the front lines as they are, the students have been fielding plenty of comments and questions.
“We’re hearing from students that people say there’s just so much information out there,” said Yanicki, co-ordinator of the new public health degree.
“And at a certain point people just start closing it out. It is quite overwhelming, the amount of information, and when people are deluged it becomes too much to process. I’ve heard of a lot of people having a hard time making a decision about the vaccine.
“That’s one of the chief things I’m hearing — that it’s difficult to decide what to do because of the conflicting information in the press. People are weighing it against their own knowledge of their health. It’s not that they haven’t received information, but it’s the level of conflicting information, and sorting out the good quality information from not-so-strong sources.”
Terminology has overwhelmed many people as well, Wojtowicz said, as they grapple with new words like adjuvant (a substance, for example, aluminum salt, added to increase the body's immune response to a vaccine).
“Understanding is crucial in making decisions,” Wojtowicz said.
Health professionals at institutions like the university have learned much from previous outbreaks of disease not only in terms of student experience, but student protection as well.
“When you’re considering how past experiences shape how we go about planning for pandemic, all of them — including the mumps outbreak here on campus two years ago — helped to shape how we can work together effectively,” said Yanicki.
“Whenever you’re doing planning you take into account the previous experiences for rollout, and this is the first time the population has had the opportunity to have a choice about a vaccine that could prevent the disease that’s currently circulating. At a pandemic level, the world has never had this choice before. Yes, there’s going to be hiccups in the rollout of it, but this is a fabulous opportunity and it demonstrates the importance of our public health systems and how challenging it is for everything to work together smoothly.”
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