When the first class of nursing students accepted diplomas from Elgin Community College in the 1960s, it was all woman. Hands-on training for the 17 graduates consisted of working only on real human patients, or each other.
In 2015, as the college celebrates the 50th anniversary of its nursing program, there are 240 students working to become registered nurses at any given time in ECC’s Health and Life Sciences Building. One out of five are male. And the tools they have to sharpen their skills include an $80,000 smart mannequin that breathes, talks back to them and can even go into cardiac arrest if they make mistakes about administering medicine and gases.
Donna Boyce, manager of the nursing skills lab and simulation center at ECC, said 3,376 more students have followed those first 17 graduates. Many are employed in Fox Valley area hospitals, doctor’s offices, nursing homes and home health services.
Boyce said ECC nursing education traces its roots to the 1940s, when Sherman Hospital in Elgin began a nurse-training program. Two blocks away, Catholic competitor Saint Joseph Hospital was offering a similar school. But Saint Joseph eventually dropped its program and in 1965 Sherman passed off its training to what was then a much smaller Elgin Community College.
Today, Boyce said, ECC takes in 80 nursing majors each fall and another 40 each spring. “Substantially more” always apply for the program than the college can fit in, she said, but she declined to provide an exact number.
Third-semester students Jaime Rohde of West Dundee and Samantha Berango of Elgin recently tried out their bedside manners (and technical skills) on that $80,000 mannequin, which the college has named Mark.
A teacher sitting invisibly behind a one-way mirror watched Rohde and Berango work on the robotic patient and spoke to the students through Mark’s mouth. “I don’t feel good. I’m having trouble breathing,” she said via Mark.
“How’s your oxygen?” one of the students asked the mannequin, checking some breathing tubes leading into his nose.
“What do you mean?” the mannequin responded.
Mark is programmed to respond with eerily human-like reactions to things such as clumsy injections or even the wrong amount of a drug being injected. As the girls worked, he suddenly began twitching in the throes of a seizure.
“We can do full codes on Mark,” Boyce said. “He breathes. He sweats. He has med recognition hardware in his arm.”
Across the room, meanwhile, third-year student Matt Miller of St. Charles practiced listening to the upper torso of another smart mannequin named Sam, which cost $12,500. Boyce had set Sam’s chest to reproduce the sounds of a normal heart in the same places a human chest would. But “I could have set him to make various lung sounds or bowel sounds,” she said.
Boyce listened in to exactly what Matt was hearing using a stethoscope with two sets of earpieces.
In a nearby lab, Berango practiced inserting a needle into a lifelike plastic arm and drawing blood out of a vessel inside. Meanwhile, Miller sat on a chair next to a mannequin in a hospital bed and practiced asking him for his medical history, recording everything the mannequin said into a tablet computer.
Asked why he wants to become a nurse, Miller said that “I want to help people. There’s also job security with this. And it won’t be a typical 9-to-5 job. It’s always changing,”
Berango said she was inspired by her parents, who both work at Elgin Mental Health Center, and she’d like to become a psychiatric nurse like her mom.
Miller said each student must do eight hours of “clinical” work every week, working alongside real nurses with real patients in a hospital or some other sort of medical practice.
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ECC spokeswoman Toya Webb said the college works with 24 clinical partners. Those taking in the most ECC students are Advocate Sherman and Presence Saint. Joseph hospitals in Elgin, Delnor Hospital in St. Charles, St. Alexius Hospital in Hoffman Estates and the Centegra Health System hospitals in McHenry County.
Outside of class, Rohde said, she already has finished ECC’s one-semester Certified Nurse Assistant program. While working toward becoming a registered nurse, she works after school as a home health aide for an elderly man who suffers from dementia.
Taking all the courses needed to be a registered nurse takes two years. But Boyce said most students also spend a year before that taking prerequisite courses such as anatomy, biology, chemistry, psychology and sociology. Thus most ECC students who get an Associate of Applied Science degree in nursing actually have been attending the college for three years.
Increasingly, Boyce said, hospitals want their registered nurses to have a four-year bachelor’s degree. Some community colleges have even begun offering those. But with ECC’s administration and board cautious about entering into the four-year-degree business, ECC so far has been addressing this problem by working closely with Northern Illinois University’s four-year nursing school.
Meanwhile, six high school students this year are taking Certified Nurse Assistant courses at ECC after they get done with their daily high school classes.
Boyce said it’s common for students to graduate from ECC, work for a few years in the nursing field, then finish their four-year degree at a place like NIU.
Nine of the current faculty, including Boyce, are ECC nursing alums.