With COVID surging, Wake Tech sends another nursing cohort to work
As North Carolina blew past its record number of new coronavirus cases on Friday, Wake Technical Community College pinned another 72 nurses and sent them off to jobs in hospitals, doctors’ offices and other healthcare settings.
What would normally be a formal ceremony with pomp and joyful tears to celebrate the completion of thousands of hours of study and practice was reduced — like so many other things have been — to a drive-through event.
And though it was held outside a parking deck on Wake Tech’s Perry Health Sciences Campus instead of in a velvet-draped auditorium, the essential elements were there: the pin, a blue-and-gold badge of honor from the Martha Mann School of Nursing; a red rose; a replica of Florence Nightingale’s lamp; and a scroll bearing the words of the nurse’s pledge.
Nursing faculty, who had worked with this cohort of students since spring semester of 2019, applauded each graduate and took turns handing out pins.
“Where will you be going to work?” Ann Marie Milner, department head of the school of nursing and a member of the N.C. Board of Nursing asked some of the students as they drove up.
Nearly 100% of the cohort already has a job lined up, Milner said. The state has extended a waiver approved earlier this year to allow graduates to begin working before they take their licensure exams.
What these events lack in strict adherence to tradition, they make up for in a sense of urgency. Milner said that while new nurses don’t expect to be assigned to COVID wards in hospitals, they will be indirectly helping fight the pandemic by allowing the reassignment of more experienced staff to those high-risk jobs.
And even outside of hospital COVID wards, which have been filling up in recent weeks, nurses can expect to come into contact with patients who are infected with the virus and may not know it.
“We didn’t sign up for this, but we did sign up for this,” said Janet Colón, who hired a Mercedes bus so she could bring her family and closest friends to the ceremony. She wanted them there, she said, because with them and the Wake Tech faculty, she never would have made it through the program while also working full-time and dealing with the stress of the pandemic.
She wasn’t complaining. Colón, who worked as an EMT before enrolling in nursing school, said she values the experience she and her classmates got.
“It’s a useful skill for us to learn how to pivot,” Colón said, because working in healthcare often requires versatility and quick thinking.
Though they know they may be more likely than others to be exposed to COVID-19, Milner said, the number of students enrolling in Wake Tech’s nursing program has increased this year.
Dave Kalbacker, spokesman for the N.C. Board of Nursing, said Friday that North Carolina has more nurses right now — more than 165,000 — than ever before.
“And it never seems to be enough,” he said.
While medical facilities don’t like to say whether they are experiencing nursing shortages, Kalbacker said one gauge of staffing needs are the ads that run in the Bulletin of Board of Nursing, published three times a year. The current edition includes sign-up bonuses of $5,000 to $10,000 at some facilities.
Elaine Husar, whose shepherd-mix dog, Porter, watched the pinning ceremony from Husar’s back seat, said that when she started out in the nursing program, she thought she wanted to work in an emergency department or trauma center.
“But you just learn so much about yourself,” Husar said. She learned that what she really wanted to do was work with neurology patients — people with traumatic brain injuries or spinal cord injuries, for example. She’ll go to work for WakeMed, she said.
After the pandemic hit, Husar said, there were a few moments where she wondered about the timing of her nursing studies, and whether it was a good idea to be coming out of school at what’s expected to be the worst time for the spread of COVID-19. Maybe she should take a pause, and graduate later, she thought. Then she got back to work.
“Right now,” she said, “they need us more than ever.”
