Sandy Schwenke, M.S.N., R.N., assistant instructor, (left) discusses correct technique with third-year medical students as they learn to start IVs on manikin arms.
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This summer more than 180 third-year medical students spent one half-day learning how to start IVs, insert feeding tubes and adjust oxygenation equipment during a new two week course called Clinical Foundations.

Over a four hour period, nursing faculty taught medical students how to start an IV, put in a Nasogastric tube and check placement of the tube. They also learned about how various types of oxygen delivery systems work, including an incentive spirometer and a nebulizer.

In a demonstration room students were able to see a variety of equipment that they will see in a hospital including wound care supplies and drains, feeding pumps, a crash cart, chest tube drainage systems, injection equipment and a deliberator with patient simulator to review cardiac arrhythmias.

“Often students are expected to know how to do various skills in clinical rotations, but they have never had any training or previous hands-on practice of these skills,” said Stephanie A. Elms, M.S.N., R.N., clinical instructor in the department of chronic nursing. “The students gained hands-on experience in this summer course that they can carry with them into the hospital for their clinical rotations.”

This is the first year that this course has been taught and has become a requirement for all third-year medical students.

Laura Ecuyer, B.S.N., R.N., assistant instructor, (center) supervises as third-year medical students listen to heart and lung sounds on a patient simulator manikin.

“The nursing faculty team put together by Ms. Elms was outstanding and the medical students rated this as the top experience in the course,” said Heidi Chumley, M.D., assistant professor in the department of family and community medicine and course director of Clinical Foundations. “We greatly appreciated our nursing colleagues holding this workshop for the medical students during their summer vacation.”

Nursing students will spend anywhere from two to three hours a week each semester working in the skills labs, learning to do not only these same skills, but also many advanced skills.

“It was a brief introduction to skills, but more importantly it was a positive interdisciplinary educational experience for the medical students,” Dr. Chumley said.