Nashua HS program offers experience
Lori Chisholm, Program Head of Nashua High School Careers and Technical Education – Health Occupations program, on the donation of eight Stryker Hospital beds through continued partnership with Southern New Hampshire Health.
Can you describe how this partnership changes or enhances the current health educational program at Nashua High School?
Southern and Nashua High have been kind of partnered throughout the years on different levels. Over the last year or so they have actually financially helped us with donations for some of the supplies we use as well as our pinning ceremony at the end of the year. This year they were actually able to donate eight Stryker hospital beds.
We had been replacing our beds one by one with our Perkins grant that we get through the school because they are quite costly. We have two labs, and each lab has five beds in it, so that was a huge help, for the students to actually have beds that work.
Laura Forgione [executive director of inpatient nursing, professional practice, and Magnet Program at Southern New Hampshire Health] … has been coming out every year and speaking to the students as well about their programs. Integrating them into the license nursing assistant part of the hospital as well as medical assisting and then on to nursing if that’s the way they choose to go. So it’s good for them to come into the school as well just to let us know about the programs that they are offering over there.
What is the student response?
One of my students that graduated from this program last year … went on to be accepted into the Rivier School of Nursing. At the beginning of this calendar year he actually asked for a recommendation for an LNA job at Southern. I do know that one of our students is actively working there, to the best of my knowledge. I think it just allows them to have information about different avenues that they can pursue and what the hospitals have to offer. Unfortunately, the State of New Hampshire and all the other states require that all the clinical hours the students get [are] in long-term care facilities. Which is unfortunate because I do think they would gain great experience being able to do that in the hospital as well. It restricts us a little bit in being able to even further the partnership with having students go there for clinicals because it is not approved by the board of nursing by the State of New Hampshire.
How important is hands-on experience for health care professionals?
Hands-on experience is extremely important. We actually start it with our students in the first year of the program, which is their junior year, typically, in our Health Science 1 class. Both the Health Science 1 and Health Science 2 class have full functioning labs that look like, in each room, five different hospital bed areas with curtains and blood pressure cuffs and side tables and overbed tables. We actually work on skills with them for their whole junior year as well as their senior year because in their senior year they actually go out and they take care of real people. They help them get showered, they help them if they can’t go in the shower, you know, get washed up in bed, get them dressed, help them to go to the bathroom, their hair, their teeth. So, they really are hands-on right from the get-go when they go out into the clinical environment. The lab environment is very important because it allows them to practice on each other before they actually touch people that rely on them to be able to help safely transfer them out of bed into a wheelchair.
What is the process of entering the program and how hard is it to get in?
It’s an awesome program. We allow area students to come that don’t have programs like this. We have students from Hollis, Brookline … Milford, Merrimack …. Obviously North and South, even though the actual program is at the South location of the high school. It not only benefits just the Nashua kids but the surrounding towns. So it depends upon the year, to be quite honest. When I had worked part-time in 2007 they had actually added a third teacher, and I was it, because the enrollment was so high. They are approved by the Health Science 1 teacher and the head teacher. If they have any questions they obviously come to me as well. Since Covid, the numbers have been down until this past year. Health Science 1 started with about 65 students. The most we can take in Health Science 2 is 48 because once we get out into the clinical environment I have one other instructor that I work with and we can each only take eight students at a time, and that is per the board of nursing of the State of New Hampshire.
For different reasons people drop out of Health Science 1. It wasn’t what they thought it would be, they aren’t performing as well as they thought they would. Next year I think I’ll have about 40-ish students. They can also do other tracks. Most of our students do the LNA track. I have a few kids that are doing physical therapy. I have two that are on our dental track. We are trying to get Pharmacy. Years ago we were able to let them go out into a clinical environment, into an actual pharmacy and work with a pharmacist and a pharmacy tech to see if that’s something they are interested in, but it is being held up at the pharmacy level because they have to get approval.
Not all of the students come out as LNAs. Some of them in Health Science 1 decide they want to be physician assistants, which, really, going into college they don’t need my program, the Health Science 2 program. They really would benefit from heavy loading on the sciences in their high school journey.
—Zachary Lewis
Featured image: Lori Chisholm. Courtesy photo.
