Program at Parkland provides experience for nursing students by Suzanne Laurent, Derry News November 2005

Colleen Manning is one of three nursing students who recently completed a nurse extern program at Parkland Medical Center in Derry. Manning worked for six weeks in the emergency room with Jodi Fletcher, a registered nurse who served as Manning's preceptor. She had applied for a job as a medical technician at Parkland for the summer and one of the nurse managers told her about the nurse extern program.

"It's a win-win situation for everyone," said Sue Ellen Van Nostrand, who was contracted to oversee the program under the direction of Eileen Keefe, director of education and nursing practice at Parkland. Van Nostrand is a nursing instructor at New Hampshire Technical College.

She organized four students who were about to enter their final year of nursing to participate in one of four clinical areas of the hospital | the emergency room, intensive care unit, vascular unit and operating room. The student for the operating room couldn't participate at the last minute, so that position was not filled this summer.

"The extern program also gives the preceptor a chance to teach, something that he or she might go into down the line," said Van Nostrand.

Although the national nursing shortage is decreasing, the number of qualified instructors has decreased also. Nursing schools have had to turn away prospective students because of a lack of teachers.

Manning, a Derry native, is in her senior year at Saint Anselm College. She found the firsthand experience she received during the externship at Parkland invaluable. "My first day back at clinical, I felt so comfortable and knew how to organize my time better," she said. Manning is doing her school clinical rotation at Catholic Medical Center, where she spends time in critical settings as part of her senior year at Saint Anselm. Manning said the Parkland staff included her in a variety of emergency room cases. One day she confessed to Fletcher that she was a little bored.

"I'll never, ever say that again," she said. "First we had a code (cardiac arrest) and brought that patient down to the catheterization lab. I came back to the emergency room and there was a patient who overdosed and had to be put on ventilation and brought to intensive care. I returned to yet another patient having a stroke with seizures."

Fletcher and Manning worked the same shifts. "Colleen's schedule was flexible enough to work around Jodi's," said Van Nostrand. "The one-to-one mentorship is what makes this program so valuable."

Manning's mother, Anne Marie Manning, is a registered nurse in the emergency department at Parkland, but they worked different shifts.

The nurse externship program is endorsed by the New Hampshire Board of Nursing to ease the transition between school and the workplace. The hospital hopes that by bringing in student nurses before their senior year, they may retain them after graduation.

Manning, however, is in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program at Saint Anselm and must complete her military obligations upon graduating. She said that Parkland was flexible in allowing her to attend her three-week reserve training this summer in the middle of the extern program. While at Parkland, Manning worked 36- to 40-hour weeks to make up for time missed.

Van Nostrand said Keefe had been planning the extern program for a couple of years. "She felt that it was important for the hospital to support new students so that they would come to love nursing and stay in the profession," she said. "Eighteen Parkland employees volunteered to precept a student."

Manning said everyone, including the doctors in the emergency room, would go out of their way to show her a new procedure. "It takes a community to raise a good nurse," said Van Nostrand.