High school students attend ‘Nurse for a Day’ event in Schwartz Lab
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The UIC College of Nursing Schwartz Lab played host to 27 Chicago high school students for a “Nurse for a Day” simulation experience on Thursday, an immersive event intended to expose underrepresented youth to nursing and health care careers.
“We know that students from underrepresented backgrounds, particularly African American and Latinx students, face barriers to entering health care fields,” said Katie Vanderzwan, DNP ’17, MS ’06, APRN-BC, CHSE, interim director of the Schwartz Lab and Clinical Resource Center. “With this event, we hope to get students excited about the potential to enter the nursing field, help them visualize what it would like to be in our program, and let them know the supports that are available as students.”
Vanderzwan organized the event with a grant from the Illinois Board of Higher Education.
The students who participated attend either George Westinghouse College Prep, a Chicago Public School in the East Garfield Park neighborhood, or Noble Street College Prep, a charter school in the West Town neighborhood.
As part of the experience, they got to rotate through UIC College of Nursing’s state-of-the-art Christine M. Schwartz Experiential Learning Center, experiencing “low-fidelity” simulations, involving wound care and respiratory skills, and “high-fidelity” simulations, involving a realistic simulated birth in the Francis Birthing Suite with the SimMom and SimBaby.
They also got to talk to seven students from the Urban Health Program College of Nursing Student Association.
Kiara Caref, a junior at Westinghouse, said the experience gave her a sense of what nursing school might be like – including a realistic picture of the things nursing students need to learn and remember.
“I was impressed by what I saw,” she says. “It seems like a stressful, but fun, job.”
UIC Nursing is committed to not only enrolling a diverse student body, but also retaining it, says Vanderzwan. This includes implementing a holistic admissions policy and offering services through the Urban Health Program, such as its signature summer series to help prepare incoming students for the rigors of nursing coursework.
Lynn Ortiz, simulation lab coordinator, said many of the students were impressed by the realism of the simulations.
“Hopefully, we have some future nurses out there who want to come to UIC,” she says.