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As the pandemic started to surge in the United States, UNCG announced that everything would go online and students would have to go back home. At the same time, hospitals were closing their doors to anyone who wasn’t a doctor, nurse, or someone who was sick and needed medical attention. This was a nightmare for nursing students, especially seniors. As this happened, the school of nursing was transitioning all undergraduate and graduate courses online. In the process, they experienced tough challenges as a result of COVID-19, and they had to be resolved quickly. 

The School of Nursing had similar impacts as the rest of the schools at UNCG in terms of changing classes to online in Spring of 2020. Having to flip all of the classes in the school of nursing in one week was a huge obstacle for faculty, as Dr. Krowchuk, Interim Dean for the School of Nursing, mentioned in our interview. Yet, they seemed to have the biggest challenge. When it comes to the program, the curriculum is rigorous and it is made up of a lot of components that are essential to educating our future nurses. In the Spring of 2020, the school had undergraduate seniors who were about to start their intensives, which is where they spend the last half of their last semester in clinical settings. Unfortunately, that did not happen because the health system halted students from participating in clinical experience due to the pandemic. Not only were seniors impacted throughout all of this but so were juniors. As a result, the school had to rely on the simulation coordinators to come up with ways that could virtually provide similar experiences that students would get in clinical. This caused the school to spend about $200,000 last March of 2020, to buy virtual simulation software. 

“Many of us, speaking as faculty, had some really good experience with teaching online but many of our undergraduate courses were not really designed that way. So, we had to educate faculty really quickly how to do this, how to set things up on canvas, our learning management system so that students could not have a delay and progress of their program.” - Dr. Heidi Krowchuk, Interim Dean of the School of Nursing, Associate Dean for Academic Programs, & Associate Professor  

Before the pandemic, the school had an abundance of PPE. But in March of 2020, clinical partners such as Moses Cone and Wake Forest Baptist Hospital were short on PPE just as every hospital across the United States. They knew that the school had a good supply of it because they run labs and at that time, weren’t using any of it as they were online. So, they asked if the school could help them and so the school delivered a lot of PPE to them. The school was happy to do this good deed, but then it left them with a depleted supply. When students were able to go back to clinicals in June of 2020, there wasn’t enough PPE for them. So, this fall, they paid $53,000 to buy gloves for students and many students even had to buy their own PPE. The program also had to work with environmental health at UNCG to have every single student mask fitted for an N-95 mask to use while in clinicals. That alone took almost 3 months says Dr. Krowchuk. They had to make additional purchases for PAPR’s and equipment to mask fit students again next academic year. Although they had to spend millions of dollars because of the pandemic, they have been able to get some of that money back through the CARES Act. 

While the school faced its own struggles, so did the nursing students. The changes that the school had to make or just ones as a result of COVID, affected them. Many of them struggled with different things related to the pandemic, one of them being mental health. The program has a student academic enhancement center where they have tutors and counselors for students. According to Dr. Krowchuk, the number of students using these resources has increased dramatically over the last year and a half due to COVID. The school now has more students with problems that they have not seen before. Because of this, the School of Nursing has been helping students as much as they can to release any burden that they may be experiencing. A great example of this is the funding that the school has given to various students. Over the year, they have expanded their funds because of the number of students who have required needs. 

Although every nursing student in the program was having a hard time adjusting, Juniors were the ones who had a more difficult time because they were just entering it. This was no different for Junior Nursing student Abigail Knight. In our interview, she expressed that she had a hard time in the beginning and even experienced burnout early on. She went on to mention that she feels like she has missed out on a part of the experience, especially with a missed white coat ceremony, having her health assessment and fundamental summer course online, and feeling a lack of community building with classmates as their class was split up. When the fall semester started, her class was bigger, but due to covid that changed and many had to put their studies on hold and start again in the Fall of 2021. Something that she had to adjust to, just as everyone in her class and the undergraduate program, were clinicals. They weren’t like in previous years. They had to wear face masks and shields, do COVID-19 screening before every clinical experience, and submit proof of it. Seniors also felt the effects as a handful of them got maybe one day of clinicals at the start of the pandemic as Abigail described. Yet, nursing students have certainly not been alone in this as the school has spent time with them to solve some of their problems as a result of this pandemic and have done a great job in doing so. 

“In the fall semester, I experienced burnout as I have never experienced it before, and it got to the point where I couldn’t make myself do my lecture notes. I was really struggling for most of that semester. So, the fact that I even passed at all and did fairly well was really surprising to me”

Abigail Knight, Nursing Student Class of 2022

Even though the school of nursing and its students did not anticipate the impacts that they experienced, the students have been able to continue their education and faculty have continued to teach the nurses of tomorrow. Despite having virtual classes again for the Fall of 2020, clinicals and labs have resumed back to face-to-face format. For the Spring 2021 semester, about 30% of classes became face-to-face, while the rest were online. Fortunately, clinicals continued with a normal schedule just as the fall semester. For next year, Dr. Krowchuck states that classes that were scheduled for face-to-face will carry on that way thanks to the new School of Nursing building. As vaccines have been rolled out and almost a handful of their students and about every faculty has gotten their doses, they are hopeful about the next academic year and look forward to getting back to a new type of normal.

article written by-Gina Guzman-Cisneros