Building Resilience in Nursing Students During the Pandemic

Abstract

Abstract: As a nursing professor at Goshen College, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, and a nurse practitioner working at an urgent care, I have realized that there are lessons from the clinic’s transformation into a COVID-19 testing center that can be applied to educating future nurses. As nurses, we must adapt to different work environments, ever-changing practices as research progresses, and a population whose needs are different now than they will be in five years. As nursing educators, these lessons are some of the most difficult to pass on to students as the majority of their nursing education occurs in a classroom or lab, and nearly all of their clinical experience occurs in a hospital. In this essay, I explore the ways in which I taught students about the resilience that nurses must have and how the transition at the urgent care has aided these efforts.

For those of us with limited online teaching experience, making hours of lecture videos could have been seen as the safe choice. But doing so would have shortchanged our students: we would not have replaced students honing their skills in lab or interacting with real patients during their clinicals. I discuss some of the methods our department used to combat these tendencies; for example, my students recorded themselves physically assessing family members. In addition to demonstrating our adaptability in teaching, the nursing faculty showed our students first-hand how resilient their professors have been: several of us practice, and a handful, including me, have increased our hours on the front lines of this pandemic in part because we view nursing as our vocation: we help whenever needed (White, 2002).