By Christina Orlovsky, senior staff writer
A full-time nursing school schedule often requires so much
time and energy that a part-time job might get in the way of the educational
experience. But thanks to an innovative employment program instituted in British
Columbia, Canada, third- and fourth-year nursing students are able to obtain
part-time jobs that do just the opposite: enrich their education.
The Undergraduate Nurse Project, an employment program for
students, offers upper-level nursing students the opportunity to work part-time
at local health authorities. The program, which began in 2001 as the result of a
student project at the University of Victoria, in Victoria, British Columbia,
has since begun operating at facilities province-wide.
“A fourth-year student in a course called Nurses Influencing
Change worked as an employee in another province and came up with this plan for
British Columbia,” said Lucia Gamroth, RN, BSN, Ph.D., associate professor in
the school of nursing at the University of Victoria.
Together, student nurses, employers, educators, the British
Columbia Nurses Union (BCNU) and the Registered Nurses Association of British
Columbia (RNABC) then devised a program. According to the BCNU, the goals of the
program were to:
- Increase the recruitment of new grads in British Columbia by
building an employment relationship prior to graduation.
- Offer paid part-time or part-year employment to students to
help offset the costs of nurse education.
- Provide student nurses with clinical nursing experience so
that they will be job-ready when they graduate.
- Foster a climate of professional renewal and give current
RNs some hope that their workload will improve over time.
To fulfill these goals, undergraduate nurses are hired at a
base pay of $21.15 ($17.29 U.S.) per hour for positions in various nursing
units, including mental health, emergency and medical/surgical. One of the key
stipulations of the program, said Gamroth, is that the undergraduate positions
are supernumerary, “over and above” scheduled nursing staff, meaning, for
example, that they may not fill in for staff nurses that are sick or on
vacation.
According to Deanna Hutchings, RN, MSN, a nurse educator and
coordinator of the Undergraduate Nurse Employment Program at the Vancouver
Island Health Authority (VIHA), it is this supernumerary status that makes the
undergraduate nurses such an asset to the nursing staff.
“Nurses have an extra pair of hands,” she said.
Gamroth, who performed a three-year concurrent evaluation of
the project, found that feedback about the program from the staff nurses and the
facilities as a whole has been extremely positive.
“The immediate outcome the facilities and staff nurses saw was
improved patient care and satisfaction,” she said. “The undergraduate nurse
created a hope for staff, gave RNs time to deal with families, boosted morale
and helped with workload—all the things that nurses are really burdened by now.”
Hutchings has seen the same results at her facility.
“The beauty is that it really is a win-win-win situation," she said. "The
nursing units benefit and the patients and families benefit because everyone has
more time to spend with the patients.” Hutchings added that many of the
undergraduate nurses will take on difficult or gravely ill patients because they
have more time to spend with them.
“The nurses win because the undergrads tend to be vibrant and
energetic. They bring an energy and vitality that boosts nurses’ morale,” she
added.
“Finally, the undergrads benefit in a multitude of ways:
They’re paid a good wage and they become members of the union where they can
accrue seniority,” she said.
Some of the greatest benefits, stated both Gamroth and
Hutchings, are those the undergraduates gain from being an employee—not just a
student nurse—in a hospital setting.
In Gamroth's evaluation, she heard feedback from numerous undergraduate nurses that reported feeling a greater sense of the team atmosphere because they were a paid employee, rather than just a nursing student.
“The undergraduate nurse had the value of actually being an
employee that was set apart from any learning involved in their practicums,” she
said.
Hutchings asserted: “There’s a fundamental difference in the
identity between being a student and being an employee that gets to be involved
in breaks with their colleagues and gets invited to baby showers—they feel like
one of the team. It forges their professional identity in a way that a practicum
can’t.”
Crystal Gill, a fourth-year nursing student who joined the
program in 2003, credited the program for boosting the confidence and knowledge
she’ll need to apply once she graduates this spring.
“I’m gaining a lot of hands-on nursing experience. I’ve become
more comfortable with my skills. I feel part of the health care team,” she said.
“I’m still a student, so I’m still learning. But when I graduate I’ll know what
to expect and won’t be shocked by the workload.”
Yet another undergraduate nurse who worked in acute care
mental health at VIHA commented to Hutchings, “This has been an outstanding
experience, and has greatly increased my level of confidence in the workplace.”
What the students do once they graduate is another important
component of the Undergraduate Nurse Project. Gamroth, who also evaluated the
students upon graduation and the year after, found that the undergraduate nurses
had a much easier transition into the RN position than their fellow students who
had not had the workplace experience.
“What we discovered with all the students was that many of
them were recruited into the same places where they did their undergraduate
nurse employment or their practicums,” Gamroth said. “At the end, there were
more undergraduate nurses that stayed in their position. This was significant
for the health authority because their whole point was for recruitment.”
Hutchings explained that the program has been just as
essential for retention, especially during a nursing shortage.
“Figures show that we lose nurses to the profession in the
first three years of practice,” she said. “It is our contention and our hope
that if the student nurses have more confidence and competence, their transition
to being a grad might be easier. That would be a big deal in terms of
retention.”
Resources:
British Columbia Nurses Union
University of Victoria
Vancouver Island Health Authority
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