Last week, Berlin High School opened its new Nursing Assistant Lab in cooperation with Moraine Park. The lab was made possible by a donation from ThedaCare and a generous grant from the ThedaCare Foundation. The lab includes two hospital beds, nursing supplies and curriculum materials for up to ten students per semester to become Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA).

The partnership between Moraine Park and Berlin High School creates opportunities for students and assists health care employers in Green Lake County with finding certified employees.

“As the demand for qualified health care professionals, including certified nursing assistants, grows, we respond to that demand,” Moraine Park associate dean of health, Katie Hughes, said. “Offering the course at Berlin High School benefits the students as they can earn college credit and not have to travel, but it also benefits the community in that these students will complete their clinicals at Juliette Manor just across the street and many undoubtedly will be hired to work there or at other local agencies.”

Moraine Park Nursing Instructor and program director, Anne Deacy, provided guidance to Berlin High School on the required equipment and supplies for the room and for the students. Moraine Park also assisted in finding the instructor for the course, finding a clinical site location, having the room approved by the state, and registering the students for the program; which included helping the students to complete the clinical site’s required paperwork such as background checks, immunization paperwork and applications. 

“The Nursing Assistant program provides the students with an opportunity to get a sneak peek into the health care field,” Moraine Park K12 partnership coordinator, Beth Roehl, said. “Students can use this certification and be employed as a nursing assistant or they can use this certification as a building block to prepare them for a future career in health care.”

Moraine Park has several health care programs that a student can move on to after becoming a CNA such as Diagnostic Medical Sonography, Radiography, Nursing – with an exit point of LPN or RN, Surgical Technology, Medical Assistant or Respiratory Therapy. 

“There is a high demand for health care workers, and Moraine Park’s role is to bridge the gap between employers and high school students by viewing them as future employees,” Roehl said. “We will continue to work with high schools to assist students who foresee a future for themselves in health care.”

Moraine Park partners with 27 district high schools to offer a variety of coursework in health care, business, information technology, trades and manufacturing. To learn more about dual credit opportunities, visit www.morainepark.edu/academics/k-12-resources/.

Last week, Moraine Park Technical College (MPTC) nursing students partnered with Oakfield Elementary School to teach K-5 students the importance of hand hygiene and germ control.

The event was coordinated by MPTC Nursing Instructor, Casey Truse, and Oakfield Elementary School Nurse, Mekenzie Bowe. The six participating nursing students from Truse’s class included Nick Santiago of Kenosha, Paige Fraley of Hartford, Kendra Smith of Hartford, Michael Boyd of Manteno, Kali Herrick of Horicon and Kasey Butcher of West Bend.

The students each presented individually to two classrooms. They were given three weeks to prepare their presentations and cater their approach to their assigned grade levels ranging from kindergarten to fifth grade.

“We do a teaching project every semester in this clinical, and they typically present to each other on some type of key learning they attained,” Truse said. “Being able to get out into the community again since the onset of the pandemic is great.”

The presentations went over how to properly wash your hands and what can happen if you let germs linger. Some of the presentations included books and songs about handwashing and experiments using glitter, pepper, and more.

“Hand hygiene and germ control is super important for our students to learn going into flu season,” Oakfield Elementary School Nurse, Mekenzie Bowe, said. “We always try to reinforce the importance of handwashing, but learning it today in such a fun, engaging way is much more impactful for our students.”

MPTC nursing student, Nick Santiago, demonstrated the impact of hand washing by bringing in petri dishes with samples he took from his own hands. The samples showed the amount of bacteria that can grow after washing your hands properly, washing with just cold water, and not washing at all. 

“The germs were nasty,” an Oakfield Elementary fifth grader said about the experience. “Not washing your hands makes way more germs than when you wash your hands with hot water.”

In November, Truse’s nursing students partnered with Oakfield School District to assist with hearing and vision screening. They were asked to come back and work with the students again–this time with a focus on teaching them.

“It is important for students to learn how to adapt clinical care across the lifespan ranging from pediatrics to geriatrics,” Truse said. “We as a nursing program love for students to have interactions and experiences with people of all ages. Our goal is to continue partnering with schools within our communities to create impactful learning experiences for all.”

Oakfield Elementary is Truse’s hometown elementary school, so the partnership between the schools brings her education-to-teaching journey full circle.

“Being back in Oakfield and working with such an amazing district is an honor,” Truse said. “Walking the halls of the schools I once attended, seeing familiar faces that shaped my own childhood education, and guiding our nursing students through such a neat experience was all around incredibly rewarding.”

View more photos at https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAiiKA.

Moraine Park Technical College Nursing student, Carrie Kuehn of Beaver Dam, received the College’s first DAISY Award for Extraordinary Nursing Students on Friday, Dec. 17, at the Beaver Dam campus Pinning Ceremony.

The award was created to recognize and celebrate nursing students for the above-and-beyond care and compassion shown to patients and their families. The DAISY Foundation hopes that this program will inspire and motivate students to provide the best clinical skills possible and to impact patients and families with human spirit and kindness.

Kuehn was nominated by a fellow Moraine Park Nursing student, Shane Keck.

“Carrie is an inspiration at clinical,” Keck said. “She is such a professional and so quick at clinicals that we all marvel at her competency. She’s also unbelievably kind and picks others up when they’re down and struggling. Carrie is a phenomenal leader and I truly believe she’ll be a shining star of an RN someday soon.” 

Kuehn, a fourth-semester student, was chosen through a blind selection process by Moraine Park’s DAISY committee made up of three Moraine Park representatives and one advisory member. Nominations for the award can come from any patient, staff nurse, fellow students, faculty or member of the community that the student has positively impacted.

“I had no idea I would be receiving this award,” Kuehn said. ‘It came as a complete surprise, and I am honored to have even been nominated. I’ve wanted to be a nurse since I was a child, so the recognition means everything to me.”

Read more about the DAISY Award at Moraine Park.

Nursing School can be challenging and overwhelming, but also rewarding and fulfilling. The pressures associated with class load, clinicals, exams, and job availability can make it easy to lose sight of the art of caring while learning the science of nursing.

The DAISY Award for Extraordinary Nursing Students was created to recognize and celebrate nursing students for the above-and-beyond care and compassion shown to patients and their families. The DAISY Foundation hopes that this program will inspire and motivate students to provide the best clinical skills possible and to impact patients and families with human spirit and kindness. 

Nominations for this award can come from any patient, staff nurse, fellow nursing students, faculty, or member of the community that the student has had a positive impact on.

The nomination period is now through December 1, 2021. The review committee will meet in mid-December and reveal the recipient at Moraine Park’s Pinning Ceremonies. The review committee has specific criteria for the selection committee that can be found on their website. The committee will include the following:

Kelly Shafaie (Representative from Dean’s office) 

Barb Brown (Alumni and retired faculty) 

Kelli De Ruyter (Partner facility, Cedar Community Advisory Member) 

Anne Lemke (Leadership at MPTC) 

Student life representatives will take turns on panel (Lisa Manuell, Sandy Botham for this academic year) 

Nominate here.

Any questions about the DAISY Award can be directed to the Student Nurses Association (SNA) advisors on each campus:

Beaver Dam- Grace Rommelfanger

Fond du Lac- Melissa Rodriguez  and Michelle Mengert 

West Bend- Karrie Bruegman-May

Moraine Park Technical College nursing students will be assisting Dodge County Public Health and Advocate Aurora Health to administer the COVID-19 vaccination to eligible individuals. 

“Our nursing students have experience in helping to distribute vaccines,” Heidi Martin, Moraine Park nursing instructor, said. “We have worked with Dodge County for the past two years, helping at their flu shot clinics for students in grades K-12. We have a great relationship with the County Public Health Nurses and our local healthcare facilities, and currently, they really need our help.”

The Moraine Park nursing students participating are doing so on a volunteer basis. Their volunteer time will count toward community impact requirements at the College.  

“This is a wonderful opportunity for our nursing students to give back to the community,” Martin said. “They have the skills needed to truly impact the health of our families, neighbors and friends. My students are excited to be an active part in helping to decrease the severity of this pandemic and ultimately save lives.”

Moraine Park continuously looks for ways to offer hands-on opportunities for students in our local communities. 

For information regarding COVID-19 vaccine eligibility and distribution, visit the Wisconsin Department of Health at dhs.wisconsin.gov/covid-19.

For more information, visit morainepark.edu. 

**Photo is not from current vaccine event, and was taken pre-COVID-19.

Dodge County Public Health and Beaver Dam Moraine Park Technical College Nursing Students partnered up again this year to deliver vaccines to children in Dodge County. Last year the flu vaccine clinical occurred at Dodgeland School. However, this year, thanks to the pandemic the vaccine clinic looked a little different.  This was a first for Dodge County Public Health to offer the flu vaccine via a drive thru.

Over a four day schedule, approximately 213 flu vaccines were administered at the first ever drive thru clinic. According to Lina Rooney – Dodge County Public Health Nurse, “There is no possible way this could have happened without the MPTC staff & students. Through driving wind, rain, & chilly late afternoon temps, MPTC students soldiered on.  They established an efficient flow of assembling & handling syringes, supplies, & paperwork so everything went smoothly. They cheerfully greeted families, calmed anxious kids, and safely administered flu shots. We can’t forget their stellar traffic control skills, either; only one cone was run over! 

According to one of the students, “It was a great experience for us nursing students as we are growing into the role of becoming nurses. The exposure to working with children is priceless as typically that is an area where nursing students may have a fear of how to interact and communicate with them effectively. Essentially we ran the operation this year and all of us nursing students whether we are in our first semester or fourth semester all worked really well together which resulted in a really successful flu shot clinic for the K-12 children within our community.”

 – Kass Haima 4^th Semester Nursing Student

Overall, it was an amazing opportunity for the Beaver Dam MPTC students to give back to the community and formulate a partnership with Dodge County Public Health. We will continue to forge partnerships within the local communities that foster healthy outcomes. There was a sense of pride, collaboration, and passion that was witnessed among students, faculty, and Dodge County Public Health staff. To watch future nurses work with the community was the greatest reward of all!

Moraine Park Technical College’s nursing program is working to help students adapt to the increased utilization of telehealth technology. The Wisconsin Technical College System identified this need in 2013 and approved a grant to help implement this learning into the curriculum.

Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward the importance of offering patient care remotely, and Moraine Park continues to utilize this vital technology. To aid in these efforts, Moraine Park partnered with GrandCare, a provider of telehealth systems, in 2013.

The College’s partnership with GrandCare is coming to an end this year. However, GrandCare made a generous contribution to aid telehealth education for both present and future students. The original grant afforded the College the usage of GrandCare’s telehealth unit, and this last fall, GrandCare donated the unit to Moraine Park, allowing students the opportunity to continue to interact with the equipment.

“We are grateful to GrandCare for their partnership,” Kelly Shafaie, Associate Dean of Nursing at Moraine Park, said. “They have been a vital part of our telehealth teachings, and our faculty and students will benefit from their generosity for years to come.”

For more information on Moraine Park’s nursing program, visit morainepark.edu/nursing.

Hello friends!

I wanted to do something from the Sunshine Club to celebrate all of our hard work, so this is what I came up with. I will Blog about this before the end of the week to share with the world.

Many of us are still in acute care or practicing at the bedside, clinic or something and others are not. I want to celebrate that we all have purpose in nursing and have risen to the challenge and what we are doing in not only important, but imperative to make the best graduate nurses in order to care for our communities!

Communicate Clearly– We have had close to 30 hours of Zoom Meetings, we have emailed, instant messaged, face-timed and even used the phone to make plans for our students success.

Act Responsibly– many worked over Spring Break to start making preparations because we knew it was the thing to do. Many are working early mornings, late evenings and weekends.

Work Productively– so many are juggling your home/family life with working from home, home schooling children and still managing to get “the bacon fried up”

Think Critically and Creatively– OH BOY!!!

Adapt to Change- We have learned Zoom, STUDIO, i-Human and beyond!
Demonstrate Integrity- We have worked hard to keep MPTC’s Nursing Program rigorous while taking in consideration our students changing landscape.

Work Cooperatively– well, we always do.

Here is a semi-accurate accounting of all of things we have done inside of a 10 working day period, seriously, we all know it was more but who needs a medal? We are nurses, we do what we do, we dig in, we still cry, yell and wonder why but yet everyday we come back to whatever form of nursing we do. We are cut from a different cloth- not silk, more like burlap- resilient and lasting.
What an unfortunate way to look back at the “Year of the Nurse” but Florence would be so proud of our work. Thank you for all you have done and continue to do, “We got this”.

Associate Degree of Nursing Accomplishments

Unfolding Case Studies- 25

Rubrics- 49

Quiz Questions- 130

Presentations- 3

Patient Scenarios for CCM’s, DCT’s- 46

Discussions- 19

Small Papers- 8

Power Points- 6 weeks of Studio Power points X 5 Theory Classes X 3 sections= roughly 60 X 1,000,000​!

Sunshine Club Love to All!!!! Thank you for being our TEAM