Big Blue Nursing Bootcamp helping prepare Bluefield, Beckley students

Aug. 2—BLUEFIELD — More than 80 new students are being introduced this week to the challenges of their classes and how they can navigate the path to becoming a nurse.

The Big Blue Nursing Boot Camp at Bluefield State University is a two-day seminar for all new admissions into the nursing program. New students will conclude their orientation today with their White Coat Ceremony at the Tierney Auditorium in Dickason Hall. Students from both the Bluefield and Beckley campuses are participating.

State funding aimed at helping bring more nurses into West Virginia's health care community is helping students get their start.

"The West Virginia Nurse Expansion grants that went out, we applied for and received a million dollars," said Sandra Wynn, director of nursing at Bluefield State University. "A couple of things the grant asked us to do was, of course, increase enrollment and to decrease the amount of time for students to come through programs if we could. We did increase our enrollment. We're charged to try to go up to 20 new students in addition to what we had, and we did increase our enrollment by over 20 students."

About 51 nursing students from the Bluefield campus and another 32 from Beckley are attending the Big Blue Nursing Boot Camp.

"Today we are hosting our first annual bootcamp for incoming nursing students," said Kelli Sarver, assistant nursing professor at the Bluefield campus. "It consists of the nursing orientation for our incoming classes on both the Bluefield and Beckley campuses."

The grant funding the boot camp is part of the state funding for nursing recruitment and retention, said Deborah Tonelli, associate professor of nursing at the Beckley campus.

"There's been a lot of studies about doing bootcamps and extended orientation for students and how it helps with student retention and success," Tonelli said. "We thought we'd give it a try."

Tonelli said there has been a nursing shortage for as long as she can remember. The pandemic has added new pressures to a profession that was already stressful.

"It's just through the pandemic, it's made it very stressful times," Sarver stated. "Nurses, doctors, whatever. We need more people in the nursing program because there's a big need."

A lot of people have left the nursing profession because they were getting frustrated and overworked, Tonelli said.

"They're leaving and finding other things," she stated. "I know many students who have come through here and graduated and started working, that have left nursing to do other careers because it was so stressful.

The university's nursing professors help students cope with stress in and outside the classrom.

"We do. I think we are very strong encouragers that if outside the classroom that there are stressors and things that are affecting them, our door is always open to come and talk to us and speak with us so we can kind of know what is going on outside the classroom," Sarver said

"We really stress that today, that if there is something going on in their lives, we can't help them succeed here if we don't know," Tonelli added. "There are a lot of resources we can help them with if we know they have a problem."

Tutors, counselors and resources to help address financial issues are available.

"With the economy the way it is, finances are a big deal for everybody," Sarver said. "It's impacting everybody. You've got students asking do I buy groceries or do I need to save this to buy a book for my class? It's something we try to take into consideration."

"And sometimes we can find funds that can help them so they can stay in school and eventually graduate," Tonelli said.

Ten of the new nursing students are in an accelerated program which will help them graduate in 16 months instead of 24, Wynn said.

"And we developed this accelerated program. The 10 students in this accelerated program, we wrote into our funding to provide a stipend to go to school; so each of them received approximately $22,000 to help them fund their school over the next 16 months," Wynn said.

One of these students, Julie Murphy of Bluefield said she had to have a certain grade point average and a higher entrance exam sore.

Candidates for the accelerated program had to have an entrance exam score, called a T score, of 65 or higher. Other students had to make only 58.7. Accelerate students also had to have a GPS of 3.0 or higher while others needed a lower score of 2.8.

"And they had to have their science courses and their psychology out of the way," Wynn stated.

Murphy said more than one experience inspired her to become a nurse.

"Honestly, there are a few different reasons. The first one was my sister. She had a brain tumor and going through that whole process with her and rehabilitating her made me interested in nursing," she said. "And I had to have a procedure that was actually pretty life changing. The nurses that helped me really calmed me down because I was really upset."

"They actually made a huge difference to me, and they were the first ones I talked to and helped me through the whole entire process," Murphy said. "I actually work in customer service, but it made me want to do more to help people."

— Contact Greg Jordan at gjordan@bdtonline.com

Contact Greg Jordan at gjordan@bdtonline.com