Lori Walsh: Welcome back to In the Moment. I'm Lori Walsh. Information coming in about COVID-19 testing or coronavirus testing in South Dakota. We, as you might remember from yesterday, have 11 confirmed cases and at that point yesterday, we did not have the supplies at the state department of health lab to test the several hundred cases that had not been tested yet. Well, governor Noem has tweeted that we have received a shipment of reagent and we will be processing high risk tests today. So right now we have those confirmed 11 cases still and 385 pending tests. So far in the state of South Dakota, there have been 551 negative tests. So again, that shipment to get going on processing the coronavirus tests in South Dakota has arrived and processing continues at the South Dakota Department of Health state labs.
Mary Anne Krogh has served on the board of directors for the National Board of Certification and Recertification for Nurse Anesthetists and she leads teams charging with creating a number of certification for nurses. She currently serves as the Dean of Nursing and Health Science at SDSU. She's joining us today to talk about the current and potential role of South Dakota State University nursing students and healthcare students more broadly during this pandemic. Mary Anne Krogh, welcome. Thank you.
Mary Anne Krogh: Thank you Lori.
Lori Walsh: So we heard from Dr Jerome Freeman at the Sanford Medical School at the University of South Dakota yesterday, that those students who might be having contact with patients normally are not currently. Tell us a little bit about what's happening with nursing students at SDSU.
Mary Anne Krogh: So since this coronavirus outbreak has become more of a pandemic in the US, what we've seen from our clinical partners is increasing restriction on our students' clinical activity. And really that was to protect patients, primarily in our elderly populations. So assisted living, nursing home type environments that we use utilize a lot, especially in early learning for some of our nursing students. And as time has gone on, some of our other institutions have also restricted, carried the care from our nursing students, just both to protect their patients, but I think also out of a sense of protection for our students. And so we made the move last week to move the majority of our undergraduate students out of clinical environments and to find alternative solutions for learning for them so that we could keep them on track and help them to graduate on time and their learning.
Yesterday we made the move to, after we heard from the School of Medicine, moving medical students out of clinical settings for the same timeframe also move all of our nursing students, whether they're in the undergraduate or graduate arenas, out of clinical sites. Really what we're trying to do is protect the students so that they don't get exposure in the clinical sites. But also as we've been hearing from many different respected sources, really trying to slow the spread of this virus so that our hospitals and clinical agencies have the capacity to care for the patients that they're expected to care for. So that's sort of where we're at right now.
We're using a variety of methods to get clinical learning for our students from home. Things like our virtual simulation platforms that are every bit as rigorous as clinical, our first students and they're very evidence-based, so we think students will get great learning from that. We had already been using some of the virtual platforms in our graduate programs. This simply moves it into our undergraduate programs as well. We'll be doing case studies with students where they're interactive and then global health platforms have simulations for us as well. But I think this provides some interesting learning opportunities for students as well about public health and how do we respond to pandemics and public health emergencies as a healthcare system and really think collaboratively and interprofessionally about how we provide care for patients in South Dakota and the US.
Lori Walsh: Are there challenges, and I want to talk about the students in a moment, but are there challenges for those clinical partners who relied on those nursing students?
Mary Anne Krogh: Well, nursing students today are, they're not really treated as staff in nursing units. They have an instructor that's there with them and supervises them throughout and they work right alongside the nurses. So they don't substitute for nursing care. They're more of an adjunct than actual nursing care. And so I would say no, probably not now. Yeah, no. Once upon a time, nursing students sort of did staff a lot of operating room floors. That's not really the way nursing education is delivered today.
Lori Walsh: Right. I was thinking more of those longterm care facilities or of nursing homes.
Mary Anne Krogh: So many of our students are certified nursing assistants and so sometimes they will have outside jobs in those arenas. And so that would be external to their learning. But it's a job that students have. So I would say there that we probably still do have some students who are working in those environments, but we were restricted pretty early on from going into those as nursing students.
Lori Walsh: Now I'm guessing, and tell me if I'm on the right track here, but you might have some students who are looking at this pandemic and rethinking their careers to either recommit to the idea of what they're doing in the world and their mission as nurses or doubting that. And then I'm guessing you might have others who are saying, "This is the greatest learning opportunity ever. Dean. I want to be at work. Let me get in there and do this job." So you're probably dealing with a whole range of responses as students process the pandemic and what it means for their careers.
Mary Anne Krogh: Yeah. I would guess you're probably right. We probably have the whole spectrum of what students are thinking. That's not really what they're telling us. I think right now they're more nervous about making sure that, as we've moved all of our coursework into an online framework at least for the next few weeks, making sure they are getting their schoolwork done and making sure that these virtual simulations and things like that, that they can manage and figure out how to get all of those things accomplished. I think that's creating a bigger sense of urgency for our students than down the road. Yeah.
Lori Walsh: That they just want to graduate. That's a really good point. Please, let... This is such a disruption for all college students, high school. I mean anyone in education, well everyone, but it's a unique disruption for these nursing students. Are they concerned about hiring? If they aren't going to have the kind of training that somebody a year ago had, if they're not going to have the kind of experience and then they're going into the workforce in South Dakota healthcare institutions, how are we making sure that they're going to be prepared for patients' safety and have the education that they need, but also that they're hireable and that this doesn't provide a barrier to them in the workforce?
Mary Anne Krogh: Yeah, so I'm really confident actually that the experiences we're providing for students that are different than what we have normally provided are of equal quality. So I'm not really worried about that. And truthfully, all colleges are going to be, or all nursing schools will be on equal footing with this outbreak and pandemic because across the country, students are being restricted from clinical opportunities for all of the reasons that I have talked about. And we as nursing educators, really, I've been really impressed with the sharing of ideas that I've seen nationally and statewide, people coming together, in fact. All of the nursing education deans and directors are coming together for a conference call tomorrow to share our resources to help each other out in this time because we're all having the same issues with clinical opportunities for our students and trying to make sure that they are achieving the same learning objectives as they would have achieved if they were in clinical and that we're not having any gaps related to that.So I am pretty confident we're providing the students what they need. Is it different? Absolutely. But different doesn't necessarily mean substandard.
Lori Walsh: And Mary Anne, before I let you go, we're hearing just about the exposure of nurses on the front lines for this. So many people's first contact with someone if they have the virus or if they have symptoms, is going to be a nurse. So we're thinking of all the nurses here in South Dakota. Thank you so much for your time and I hope that they all stay safe and have the supplies that they need.
Mary Anne Krogh: Yes. Thank you very much. Yeah, supplies are very important.
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