国产传媒

by Annemarie Hehir and Judith Day

This interview first appeared in the October 2022 e-magazine for The Ebell of Los Angeles. The Ebell is an educational and philanthropic organization founded by women, for women, in 1894. The article has been lightly edited to our style guidelines.

In this time of the COVID pandemic, much attention has been paid to the far-reaching repercussions it has had on the medical community. We’ve all seen stories in the press about burnout and medical staff, especially nurses, leaving the profession due to the tremendous strain of caring for COVID patients. Currently, the Ebell has eight scholars working on a degree in nursing, seven of whom are attending Mount Saint Mary’s University. We wondered how nursing students were coping with their studies and what insights they may have about their chosen profession. We invited three of our nursing scholars to sit down with us at the Ebell for a conversation about their experiences and their views of where they feel the profession is headed as we slowly emerge from the pandemic.

We discovered three exceptional and articulate women who have a passion for their profession. All three are in the Mount’s four-year traditional bachelor of science in nursing (TBSN) program. Abigail “Abby” Knight ‘23 and Angelica Seifert ‘23 were accepted as Ebell Scholars with the class of ‘20-‘21. Jasmine Gonzales ’24 was accepted as an Ebell Scholar with the class of ‘21-‘22 and is currently a junior. 

In addition to their clinical work, Seifert and Knight work at UCLA Medical Center as Care Partners, which is similar to a CNA position but non-certified. This provides them more opportunities to learn and apply their nursing skills and knowledge. Despite having the responsibilities of helping raise her two younger siblings, Seifert graduated summa cum laude from College of the Canyons High School with AA degrees in mathematics and in liberal arts and sciences with a social and behavioral sciences emphasis.

From the beginning of her journey to becoming a nurse, Knight excelled. She was accepted into the California Nursing Students’ Association, which provided her with a mentor and other support that has helped her with her studies.

Gonzales was valedictorian of her high school graduating class. She has completed her first year of clinical work at UCLA/Ronald Reagan and Providence St. John’s hospitals.

What areas of nursing are you planning to pursue?

All three women are interested in pediatric nursing, although they haven’t necessarily made final decisions. Knight has a younger sister with serious health issues whom she has helped take care of, and she has always loved working with kids. However, she also loves the fast pace and the challenges of the ER. “It’s exciting and you feel good when you have a good outcome, and you still get to work with kids,” she says. In order to become an ER nurse, Knight would first start out in medical surgery, then move to the ICU. She commented, “If you start out in OB or pediatrics, you can’t easily change. To go from treating kids to adults is like starting your career over again.”

How has the pandemic affected your academic program and your experience doing your clinicals?

One effect has been the struggle to get clinical assignments. Nursing school faculty are scrambling to find the needed placements for their students. As a result of staffing changes and shortages, hospital administrations want smaller groups of nursing students, which has led to an increase in online instruction. Scheduling has also changed. In many of the hospitals where nursing students complete their clinicals, the standard 6-to-8-hour weekday shift has been replaced with a 12-hour weekend shift. “This creates schedule conflicts with our job hours. And if you miss a shift because you contract COVID, they’re not very understanding,” Knight commented. During the COVID shutdown, 50% of clinical hours could be done online, but now 75% has to be onsite to qualify for required hours.

"I have this passion to care for people. I’ve seen how nursing has helped my family. I’m the eldest and I’ve used my nursing knowledge to care for members of my extended family. Nursing is a fulfilling job.” --Jasmine Gonzales '24

Gonzales feels her clinical experience this past school year wasn’t as hands-on because the nurses are too busy due to understaffing to provide the level of supervision clinicals normally afford. Knight and Gonzales concurred that staffing levels at both UCLA Medical Center where they work and at the hospitals where they’re doing their clinicals are low because of sickness, early retirements or nurses leaving the profession. Some of Gonzales’ peers had to move to get clinical experiences, while others were not notified of their placements until the last minute. Many hospitals where they used to go for clinicals now don’t want students because they are short staffed. Still, Gonzales feels she’s able to provide comfort care to patients and free up nurses. She shared one example of an elderly patient with dementia with whom she was able to form a bond because she was the person the patient saw most often. “Patients are directly affected by short staffing,” she noted.

All three agreed the clinical training current nursing students receive is less than what pre-COVID students received. Knight is concerned that she will not have enough opportunity to practice necessary skills, such as hanging an IV drip or administering certain medications, because nurses just don’t have sufficient time to teach. Even with all the difficulties they’re experiencing, at the end of a shift they are getting thanks and appreciation from the nurses for their help.

Has the pandemic as a potentially ongoing public health condition shaped your long-term nursing goals?

Gonzales believes that the COVID pandemic has deepened her commitment to her chosen profession because taking care of people is a large part of her identity, growing out of her family role of caregiver to her younger siblings. “I have this passion to care for people,” she says. “I’ve seen how nursing has helped my family. I’m the eldest and I’ve used my nursing knowledge to care for members of my extended family. Nursing is a fulfilling job.” 

Seifert also does not see herself in another role. “It’s in my blood. Nursing is a very independent career that requires a lot of critical thinking and working on your own,” she added.  

"Nursing is a very independent career that requires a lot of critical thinking and working on your own.” --Angelica Seifert '23

All three admitted that some days end with their crying for what they’ve experienced. Seifert recently learned a patient she’d worked on had died. Naturally, she felt very sad, but also gratified she was able to help the patient before she passed away. Knight also recently experienced the loss of a patient and is not sure she could take the heartbreak of losing a pediatric patient on a regular basis. But no matter how hard the day was, at the end of each shift they come away with a feeling of contributing good to the world and a sense of confidence that they can make a difference.

What are your opinions about people who choose not to vaccinate and/or follow COVID protocols?  And what do you feel is needed to better prepare us for the next public health crisis?

Knight feels that people often defend such choices by saying it’s their individual decision, but framing it in that way shows their unwillingness to acknowledge the dangerous effect it can — and often does — have on the larger community. “I wish they would come to work with me and see the type of people who are being hospitalized and intubated,” she said. “They are the unvaccinated.”  She cited her own sister, who’s unable to be vaccinated for health reasons, as an example of someone who may be negatively affected by others’ “individual decisions.” 

Seifert sees as a lack of respect for public health and for health care workers, as well as a lack of trust in health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control, which traditionally people explicitly trusted. “It feels like a slap in the face sometimes when people say they’re not going to get vaccinated,” she said. Seifert stressed that such people don’t understand the risk that nurses — or anyone working in the hospital — put themselves in from those who are not vaccinated and come to the hospital. “If we’re going to be better prepared next time, we need much more education about the importance of public health,” she said. “People need to be educated on how our public health system works and maybe that would build a stronger sense of trust in public officials.”

The other two women agreed that better education could help dispel some of the misinformation. Gonzales expressed her dismay at people within the medical community who remain unvaccinated and spread misinformation about the vaccines. “I find it really upsetting because these are the people who should be educating others,” she said.  She cited the importance of teaching best practices, such as checking multiple, credible sources before making such high-risk choices about one’s health.

“Social media has promoted a lot of education and provided a lot of good information. I learn something new every day. However, some people use social media to promote false information, and users need to learn how to discern what’s good information.” --Abigail "Abby" Knight '23

Knight agreed, adding, “Social media has promoted a lot of education and provided a lot of good information. I learn something new every day. However, some people use social media to promote false information, and users need to learn how to discern what’s good information.”

You’ve all chosen nursing, a traditional field for women to enter, as your profession. What is this generation of women bringing to the profession that earlier generations perhaps didn’t?

Seifert cited the expectation of equality as one of the biggest differences that today’s nurses have. “We won’t take ‘less than,’” she explains. “I am fighting for ‘more than.’ We don’t expect sexism, and we’re willing to fight for what we need. In the workplace, I’m not going to present myself as a woman; I’m going to present myself as a professional individual.” 

As a female-dominated profession, nursing had a troubling history of nurses being sexually harassed on the job by doctors, co-workers and patients, but evidence of the new expectation is that such behavior is absolutely not tolerated now. “This generation of nurses will immediately report to authorities,” says Knight. “We’re not afraid to speak up and report because you cannot treat us as less than professional.”

Seifert also noted there’s “a lot more two-way communication between doctors and nurses, and nurse-driven protocols are more common now because nurses are taking more of a leadership role in patient care.” She added that nurses have more agency when it comes to advocating for their patients and for themselves.

Gonzales agreed that this generation of nurses “has more confidence to speak their mind and will not tolerate any disrespect.” Until she began her clinicals, she didn’t realize how little doctor/patient interaction there is compared with nurse/patient interaction. “Doctors only see patients briefly, and often nurses present to the doctor what is going on. Patients trust nurses and are more open to telling nurses what’s going on with them.”

If these three dedicated young women are representative of the future of nursing, then the profession is clearly in very capable hands. The Ebell should feel proud that we have been able to play a small part in helping to secure that future with our scholarship program.