Nursing students combat Covid

Adelphi University students working in a group to study for an exam before Covid-19. Photo courtesy of Adelphi University.

LEARNING THE ROPES ON THE

FRONT LINES

Nursing students find ways to cope amid the pandemic.

BY COURTNEY INGALLS & AUGOSTINA MALLOUS

She is startled by the obnoxious sound titled “radiate” on her phone’s alarm clock and returns to her woke stage that she was in just five hours before. With barely any sleep and no time for breakfast, there is no motivation to look “nice” for a nursing student on this Monday morning in February during a global pandemic. Every morning, she begins her day by opening her MacBook Air to see “Nicole Fioretti” under a box with her face in it, alongside the faces of people she has met in person, and others with whom she has never been in a room.

Nursing students and professors are slowly adjusting to a new way of learning, while also bringing back the in-person contact that students need to excel in their studies. For nursing students specifically, most of their learning and training requires them to be in person and to have contact with actual patients, but that is not always possible during the coronavirus pandemic. Fioretti, a 19-year-old student enrolled at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, has only one class and one clinical in person; all of her other classes are online. “I can’t focus on my schoolwork in my own house,” she said. “I also can’t ever even escape school because I’m doing everything from home.” As a nursing major, the first year of classes is all about the fundamentals — learning how to take vitals and assess patients. “It’s scary. I learned the basics to my field in a non-traditional way, and I feel like there are lots of things I should be way better at doing by now,” she said. While Fioretti said she believes her school is doing its best to accommodate students, she has no choice but to practice on her family members in her living room instead of practicing on her classmates with her professors’ supervision. On Long Island, many colleges and universities tried to keep nursing students’ experiences as close as possible to what they had before. When it comes to nursing students’ classes, Rebecca Mazzoni, a junior nursing student at Adelphi University in Garden City, said certain safety steps and procedures were added to her courses.

“For us, we had to do [personal protective equipment] training, which I’m sure we had to do, but now it’s just more emphasized because of Covid,” she said. Mazzoni also said students had to go through N-95 mask fittings, as well as take quizzes about new Covid-19 protocols. One aspect of nursing students’ studies that was harder to navigate during the pandemic was clinical hours. Dr. Renee McLeod, associate dean and chairwoman of the Hofstra University graduate nursing program, said students were pulled out of

Above and below: Adelphi University students taking part in simulations in a hosptial environment before Covid-19. Photo courtesy of Adelphi University.

clinical studies from March until August, but clinical studies were needed to enable students to continue learning. “We did have a shift of some of the didactic learning, but the clinical experiences and the simulations, and actually having clinicals with patients, had to continue,” McLeod said.

While hands-on experience is important for nursing students, some colleges and universities had a hard time returning their students to these environments. “The only issue that we had, more so last semester during the height of Covid-19 here in New York, was that many of the practices would not allow outsiders to come into the practice,” Lamanna said. “So, we had to be innovative and creative in coming up with alternative ways for them to meet the number of clinical hours.”

Over the last year, hospitals have become war zones, with multiple people dying from Covid-19 each day and many others placed on ventilators to survive. “Many of these students really witnessed firsthand the direct impact of Covid-19 and what it’s [done] to the patients and their families. Their families could not visit their patients, they didn’t have contact with them, there was no socialization,” Lamanna said.

Nursing students have also seen a shift in their personal lives during the pandemic in order to continue their studies, McLeod said. “Not only did you have to deal with the fear with your patients, but the fear with your family. They had to take extra precautions not to bring Covid home.” The mental health of nursing students has also become a struggle to maintain. A recent study by the nonprofit JED Foundation, which works to prevent suicides, showed that 82 percent of students in college during the Covid-19 pandemic are dealing with anxiety; 68 percent, social isolation and loneliness; 63 percent, depression; 62 percent, trouble concentrating; and 60 percent, difficulty coping with stress in a healthy way. Shianne McGeachy, a 20-year-old student from Brooklyn who studies nursing at Adelphi, did well in school before Covid-19. While she still earns good grades, the pandemic has brought on myriad struggles that she did not anticipate. “Studying my lectures in full detail have been some of my biggest struggles when preparing for exams,” she said. “Trying to memorize everything in such short time periods has been extremely difficult because professors are packing on so much material in one semester.”

As far as her future, McGeachy is slightly concerned because of a rushed last semester. “I didn’t get to learn all of the skills a normal nursing student would have learned in a normal semester, so in some situations I generally do not know what to do because my professors would skip over that section during a lecture or lab,” she said. Many students and professors have tried to look for some positives to hold on to. Hofstra students, in particular, have taken advantage of opportunities for hands-on experience because of the pandemic. McLeod praised her students for working with the Nassau County Department of Health on surveillance and contact tracing, both at Hofstra and other testing sites across Long Island.

Looking to the future, McLeod said she believes people will continue to adapt to new ideas and ways of learning because of the pandemic, but “we will get back human contact and nurses being present with their patients because that will never go away.”