Reply With Quoteinteresting thanks for sharing
This is an interesting story. What do you all think of it? Nurturing nurses | greatfallstribune.com | Great Falls Tribune
When Benefis Health System hires nurses who have just graduated from nursing school, their first job isn't in the emergency room.
They usually spend a little time on the medical or surgical floor as a way to ease into nursing, said Fred Avis, medical director of tribal programs at Benefis.
Newly graduated nurses who take jobs in reservation hospitals typically don't have that luxury. For example, nurses who land a job at the Blackfeet Community Hospital in Browning get thrown right into the second busiest ER in the state, Avis said.
That was the inspiration behind Benefis' American Indian Nurse Internship Program.
The year-long program allows Native American nurses to spend their first year on the job working at Benefis before taking jobs at Indian Health Service hospitals.
"The nurses really get an opportunity, under perceptive guidance, to be exposed to a lot of patients with different kinds of medical problems," Avis said.
The interns, who are paid as first-year nurses, spend the first six months of the program in medical and surgical units where they can become familiar with routine care. During the second six months, they do rotations in the intensive care unit, coronary care unit, delivery, postpartum and the neonatal intensive care unit.
"When they finish, they've really had a well-rounded education," Avis said.
Danelle Stein went through Benefis' American Indian Nurse Internship Program from July 2007 to July 2008. Now she works at Blackfeet Community Hospital in Browning.
"I feel like I gained a lot of experience," Stein said.
Because Benefis is a larger hospital, she saw a wider variety of cases there than she would have experienced at the smaller Browning hospital.
"Coming to a smaller hospital as a newly graduated nurse, it would have taken me a lot longer to get the same experience," she said.
By doing rotations at Benefis, she also gained knowledge in many areas of medicine. That's beneficial because at the Blackfeet Community Hospital, there's one main ward that takes all patients, she said.
Benefis started the internship program in July 2007 after working with the reservations and the IHS office in Billings. Stein and another woman, who went on to work at the Crow reservation, graduated from the program in 2008.
Benefis took a year off from the program to gather what they learned from the first go-around and revamp it. Avis expects to offer the American Indian Nurse Internship Program starting this summer. Benefis may offer another internship session starting in January to accommodate people who graduate at that time.
interesting thanks for sharing
~I Battle the Angel of Death 40 hours a week. What do you do? ~Author Unknown~
I think this is a good idea. Getting thrown to the lions is something else, indeed!
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