A nursing tradition
Butler County Community College's latest class of nursing students will graduate at a pinning ceremony Thursday, a tradition linked to National Nurses Week.
National Nurses Week begins each year on May 6 and ends May 12, Florence Nightingale's birthday.
According to the American Nurses Association, these permanent dates enhance planning and position National Nurses Week as an established event.
According to Patricia Annear, BC3's dean of nursing and allied health, the community college tries to honor the profession every year by having its symbolic pinning ceremony during Nurses Week. Annear said, “It's traditional, a lot of nursing programs hold that pinning ceremony as a tribute to the nursing tradition.
“We are not doing a formal observance, but what we are doing is we try to make sure our pinning ceremony is around May 10,” she said. “That's sort of where we honor it. Everyone gets a corsage, all of the faculty are there.
“We have alums that come, mentors that come, families come and a dessert reception,” she said.
The nursing students had to run a pretty tough race to reach that dessert table, Annear noted.
“This pinning ceremony, we are looking at about 48. We started out with 70. It is a pretty rigorous two-year associate degree program. We usually have a 65 to 70 percent completion rate,” she said.
Since the program was started in 1973, Annear estimated the community college has pinned between 1,500 and 2,000 nurses.
One of those graduates was Connie King of Butler, a nursing supervisor at Concordia Lutheran Ministries in Jefferson Township, who has been a nurse for nearly 37 years.King supervises two rehabilitation units and three long-term care units at Concordia.“You have to have a different skill set,” King said. “You've got patients that are more unstable, coming directly from the hospital. You've got to deal with strokes, hip replacements.”King said it was very different when she first joined Concordia.She said, “When I first started here we had one building.“And there have been advances in nursing. Paper has become computer records. And there is a waiting list to get into Concordia,” King said.That growth in care facilities could be why newly minted nurses can have their pick of jobs.Annear said, “There is a big nursing shortage. Our nursing students are getting jobs, some are getting two or three offers. Most of our students, upward to 90 percent, will end up in the hospital setting, others are in long-term care facilities.”Annear said the BC3 nursing students needed to fill those empty slots are coming from a combination of places.She said, “We have students coming right out of high school. We have people looking to start a different career, people whose children have grown and are starting their own careers.”Kristina Walker of Chicora was one of those who changed careers to nursing.“I did truck driving for a year,” Walker said before going back to school for a nursing degree. But she admitted nursing was always an option.“Whenever I was younger, my mother was a certified nurses aide. Whenever it was 'Take Your Daughter to Work Day' she took me and I just liked it,” Walker said.Her fellow Concordia colleague Shari Wright of Butler, a personal care unit manager, came back to Concordia after getting a psychology degree.“I became a drug and alcohol nurse, I didn't care for that,” Wright said.Theresa Elder of Saxonburg, Concordia's quality improvement manager, said she went to nursing school when her children entered high school or were out of the house.
Annear also noted male nurses are no longer unusual in the school's nursing classes.Annear said, “We are very pleased with the male nurses, we like having the classes diversified. I would probably say up to 20 percent of the class is male. It's still a more female-dominated profession, but males are making great nurses.”And while the nursing profession has evolved in ways beyond the imagining of Nightingale, who came to prominence while serving as a manager of nurses trained by her during the Crimean War in 1854, some things remain the same.Asked what makes a good nurse, Annear said, “The number one characteristic is caring. To do this job well, you have to legitimately care about people.”“The second one is professionalism,” Annear said. “Not to get rattled. At the end of the day you can't be afraid to to go that extra mile.“That's being professional and that's being accountable.”The 37-year veteran King said, “I have a passion for caring for people. You have to be dedicated. It is not an easy job. If you go looking for it, it is not an always appreciated job. You have to have very broad shoulders to be in this field.”Wright said, “You definitely have to be self-sufficient. Yo have to be dedicated.“It's not a job for glory but it can be a rewarding one. One person can make it a rewarding job,” said Wright.Brenda Hildebrand of Chicora, a licensed practical nurse at Concordia, said. “I feel like you have to be responsible. If you are not there to take care of your patients, there is no one there to take care of them.”“You have to be dedicated, dependable and responsible,” said Hildebrand and resigned to missing a lot of holidays with family.Still, nursing has its rewards, just not monetary ones, said Wright.“No matter what the challenges in the day, when you do something to a make their day it makes it worthwhile. When a patient's face lights up, it makes it worth it,” Wright said.
With National Nurses Week kicking off Sunday, the personal-finance website WalletHub released its report on 2018's Best & Worst States for Nurses.To help new nursing graduates find the best markets for their profession, WalletHub compared the relative attractiveness of the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 21 key metrics. The data set ranges from monthly average starting salary for nurses to health-care facilities per capita to nursing-job openings per capita.Best States for Nurses1. Maine2. Montana3. Washington4. Wyoming5. New Mexico6. Minnesota7. Arizona8. New Hampshire9. Oregon10. ColoradoWorst States for Nurses1. Ohio2. Mississippi3. Oklahoma4. New York5. Tennessee6. Louisiana7. Alabama8. Vermont9. Hawaii10. District of ColumbiaPennsylvania ranked 32nd out of 50 states and the District of Columbia.Nevada has the highest annual mean wage for registered nurses (adjusted for cost of living), $81,165, which is about 1.6 times higher than in Hawaii, the lowest at $51,508.Utah has the lowest current competition (number of nurses per 1,000 residents), 8.52, which is 2.4 times lower than in the District of Columbia, the highest at 20.58.Nevada has the lowest future competition (projected number of nurses per 1,000 residents by 2024), 7.02, which is 4.4 times lower than in the District of Columbia, the highest at 30.71.Minnesota has the highest ratio of nurses to hospital beds, 4.78, which is 2.2 times higher than in District of Columbia, the lowest at 2.19.SOURCE: WalletHub
