By offering classes that aid students in the direction of their career paths, the Columbia Area Career Center prides itself in preparing students for their futures after high school. Most of these classes offer hands-on experiences allowing students to get a feel for the jobs that they plan on pursuing post-high school.
Professions in Healthcare, a class at CACC, focuses greatly on skill application in the real-life setting. Students enrolled in this class learn medical terminology, basic communication and patient care skills in the classroom and practice these learned skills in the CACC hospital-style lab.
However, starting Oct. 21 students began their introduction into the clinical setting. Professions in Healthcare instructor Monica Duemmel attends clinicals with her students twice a week and watches over them as they put the skills they’ve learned into practice with the nursing home patients.
The purpose of clinicals is “to get students a hands-on approach of taking care of residents, learning the basic nursing skills, interacting with them, giving them an idea of what it’s going to be like as a future healthcare provider,” Duemmel said. “They’re allowed to do quite a bit as far as basic care; any of the activities of daily living, some of the needs like going to breakfast, getting dressed, brushing their teeth, combing their hair, going to the bathroom.”
For their clinical experience, students will be bused to Lenoir Woods, a senior services community, twice a week for several months to work one-on-one with residents. Before entering this clinical setting students learned a number of skills. They progressively increase knowledge in class in order to better participate in clinicals.
“They have to know some basic orientation, some basic nursing skills, safety issues, how to safely transfer someone, how to walk with someone, how to feed and help someone eat, basic showers, communication skills [and] how to deal with the confused,” Duemmel said. “Some of these skills we work on all year long so I don’t expect them to be perfect that first week, but you got to kind of know an idea of what to do, and then we’ll work on them as we go through clinicals.”
Classified as nurse assistants, students in the Professions in Healthcare still don’t have their certification. However, they are still allowed to do the amount that a Certified Nurse Assistant can, once under the supervision of their teacher and the charge nurse on site, according to Jill Layne, Health Care Services Administrator.
“As long as they have taken their first 16 hours of clinicals they can come to us and do everything a Certified Nurse Assisstant can do,” Layne said. “What we like about [having the students] is first of all it gives them the opportunity to develop their skills, and our residents absolutely love it when they come because they get one-on-one attention while they’re here … so it’s a win-win for all.”
Such clinicals also give students a unique chance to get a feel for working with actual people and helps them to decide whether or not they want to work in patient-focused care or if they are uncomfortable in that setting, Duemmel said.  Senior Maddi Allen-Hanson is a student in Duemmel’s afternoon Professions in Healthcare class. She plans on going into healthcare when she graduates from high school and the program, but is unsure of what specific field she would be the most apt for.
“I took the class to decide if I like working with patients and being hands on with them or if I want to do the separate side of it and do independent medical research,” Allen-Hanson said. “The benefits [of clinicals] are just realizing what the patients actual needs are … and being able to learn if you like to work with patients or not”
The students will work closely with each of the residents getting to know them and their needs. Though they will display their nursing skills, they will also be tending to the resident’s social and emotional needs.
“Of course they do the physical needs … they do basic care they do bathing, they do toileting, they do dressing, grooming, just different things like that,” Layne said, “but most of it is emotional needs just talking to them, having someone there to converse with.”
Several nursing programs, in addition to the one at CACC, use Lenior Woods as an outreach to practice their skills in a real-life setting. After spending 100 hours at Lenoir with the residents, several of the students will have the opportunity to continue care in that same facility.
While CACC students progress in their Professions in Healthcare class they will try and demonstate their ability to work in such a geriatric care setting to the staff of places such as Lenoir. So not only are the teachers assessing the skills, but also the professionals on the site are evaluating to see who would work well in their facility in the future.
“We have the Mizzou [Registered Nurse] program here, we have State Fair Community College students, we have the Career Center when they have a class and their [Licensed Practice Nurse] students here and then we have Moberly Area Community College LPN’s,” Layne said. “Our CNA’s that are our employees are assessing [the students] the whole time.”
The Professions in Healthcare course accounts for three credits on a student’s transcript, meaning that they meet everyday of the week for two and a half hours. Though this may seem like a lot of time to spend in one class, much material is covered in order for students to be able to pass their final assessment at the end of the year. This test, called the Certified Nursing Assistant assessment requires for students to have 75 hours of in-class instruction time as well as 100 hours in the clinical setting.
The department built in enough clinical days for students to be able to miss four days of clinicals and still be qualified to take the CNA assessment. With these steep requirements, students must be devoted to missing as little school as possible so that they can meet assigned markers for this demanding program.
“It’s not hard it just takes time, you’ve got to have really good attendance because we don’t have a lot of time and you have to get 100 hours in, so attendance is a big issue. We have days built in for absences, but not a lot,” Duemmel said. “Snow days, those are days that we will make up sometimes at the end of the year. Right now we test in April and it gives us about a months time in case we do have snow days. It’ll get done, we’ll just go to clinicals four days a week instead of two if we have to, to get them in.”
By Brittany Cornelison