FOR RELEASE: Thursday, June 18, 2009
Teens Learn of Guaranteed Job Opportunities in Nursing
Above, students from Springdale practice measuring each other's blood pressure. Below, students listen to the simulated heartbeat and breathing of a mannequin in a nursing laboratory in Ozark Hall.
In today's down job market, Lepaine Sharp-McHenry's words were striking: "In this profession, it is pretty much guaranteed that you can find a job anywhere in the United States."
Sharp-McHenry is a clinical instructor and assistant director of the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing at the University of Arkansas. She was telling a group of 13 teenagers from Springdale schools about the varied careers they could have in the field of nursing. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, nursing is the largest health-care profession. On its Web site, the association also cites a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projection that more than 1 million new and replacement registered nurses will be needed by 2016.
What that means, Sharp-McHenry explained, is that a huge variety of jobs are open to nursing program graduates. The list includes working in doctor's offices; in hospitals on general medical floors, operating rooms or emergency rooms; at schools; in clinics from general practice and pediatrics to oncology and orthopedics; on military bases; for government agencies; and in the legal field. Nursing specialties include cardiac care, burn care, wound care, dialysis, oncology, gynecology and obstetrics, geriatric care, employee health, neonatal care, forensic investigation, home health, rehabilitation, mental health and research.
The 13 junior high school students visited the nursing school in Ozark Hall on June 9 as part of a weeklong program called CHAMPS, or Community Health Applied in Medical Public Service, funded by the Area Health Education Center-Northwest in Fayetteville, an outreach program of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
To encourage the students' interest in health-related careers, the program takes them to medical facilities and institutions of higher education in the region to learn about health-care professions and the academic preparation required for such careers. This is the fourth year for the program. Participating students are chosen based on their grade-point average, recommendations from a teacher or counselor and whether they were taking and doing well in science and math courses. They finish the week with a graduation ceremony.
"You are not limited to one particular area of health care," said Sharp-McHenry, who also talked briefly about the courses students would take in nursing school. "You can do many, many different things."
She also explained that a licensed nurse in Arkansas can work in any of 23 other states without applying for a new license. The mutual recognition model of nurse licensure allows a nurse to have one license (in his or her state of residency) and to practice in other states (both physical and electronic), subject to each state's practice law and regulation.
Sharp-McHenry, an R.N. with a master's degree and special training as a psychiatric mental health clinical nurse, mapped her 28-year career in nursing so far to illustrate the myriad opportunities available. She told the students about working on a medical floor of a hospital, for an oncologist, in long-term care for elderly and as a legal nurse consultant traveling all over the country to testify as an expert witness in lawsuits.
She described memorable experiences such as being asked to participate in an autopsy, administering CPR to a patient who vomited, reacting when a patient went into anaphylactic shock as a side effect of an experimental cancer drug and discovering that lawyers are not under oath – and thus not required to tell the truth – during courtroom litigation.
The group of students, which was about evenly divided between boys and girls, watched brief videos with information about vital signs and how a nurse assesses them. They moved from the nursing classroom to a laboratory to take each other's blood pressure and listen through stethoscopes to mannequins programmed to breathe normally and to wheeze. They also listened to the mannequins' simulated heartbeats and each other's heartbeats.
Several students – but nearly all boys – volunteered their height and weight when Sharp-McHenry accessed a body mass index calculator online. She talked about how diet and exercise are some of the "controllable" factors that contribute to high blood pressure.
The students had received a lesson on cardiopulmonary resuscitation earlier that day in a visit to Central Emergency Medical Service in Fayetteville so Sharp-McHenry gave them a quick refresher and stationed them at four mannequins on tables in the classroom. She imagined a different scenario for each group as they pretended to come upon a person who was not breathing.
"You give two breaths followed by 30 chest compressions," she said. "You need to establish a rhythm and keep going. You can't stop until the person breathes on their own or help arrives.
"It's hard work."
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Contact:
Heidi Stambuck, director of communications
College of Education and Health Professions
479-575-3138, stambuck@uark.edu