A call to care
A long year amid a global pandemic puts an exclamation mark on the relevance and strength of the Marquette Nurse
By Lauren Sieben
When COVID-19 first started spreading in the U.S. last spring, nurses found themselves navigating frighteningly uncharted waters as they treated patients infected with an unpredictable and deadly virus. Marquette closed campus and moved to a remote-learning model, abruptly shutting down classroom and clinical learning. Educating Marquette Nurses required nimble, innovative faculty leadership and resiliency from students — strengths also found in their practicing counterparts on the front line. Still today, Marquette Nurses, faculty and students continue to rise to the challenges of this unprecedented health crisis, guided by Ignatian values and the Marquette mission to Be The Difference.
Students heed the call to serve amid COVID-19
Nursing student Elizabeth Murillo thought she had her summer 2020 plans locked in: She would travel to Peru to study abroad and complete part of the clinical training for her nursing degree.
But the pandemic had other plans.
Instead of traveling to South America, the coronavirus pandemic grounded Murillo in Milwaukee. One silver lining was a new opportunity to begin a clinical placement with the Milwaukee Health Department. For six weeks, she worked alongside other Marquette nursing students on the COVID-19 hotline, performing outreach to educate the community about the virus, social distancing and mask wearing. After her clinical rotation, she was hired by the city and continues to work part time at the call center.
At first, Murillo admits she was disappointed that her study abroad plans were thwarted. “But I realized, who else is going to be able to say they worked and helped with the pandemic?” she says. “I felt really supported by the people who were at the Health Department. We were all learning together.”
Murillo is bilingual in Spanish, and most of her calls were to Spanish-speaking patients. Many patients told her they were relieved to hear from someone in their native language.
“That’s been the most rewarding, especially because these are communities that have been the most impacted by COVID-19,” Murillo says. “They’re essential workers in a lot of situations.”
Murillo says working directly with patients and community members at the city call center has been invaluable as she prepares to graduate and enter the job market.
“It’s given me a lot more confidence with the uncertainty there sometimes is in health care, especially right now during a pandemic,” she says.
Nursing students are also gaining valuable clinical experience at the Marquette University Medical Clinic hotline, where they’re helping the Marquette community reduce the spread of the virus. The Marquette call center opened in the wake of the pandemic and was modeled after the Milwaukee Health Department’s call center.
“The nursing students play a very pivotal role in mitigating the transmission of COVID within the Marquette community,” says Dionne Young, Nurs ’01, Grad ’08, a clinical instructor who works with nursing students at Marquette’s call center. “They exemplify cura personalis. Each of them displayed extraordinary commitment to the call center in spite of quarantine or isolation measures that were placed on them.”
Alumni networking goes virtual
For the past few years, speed networking events in the College of Nursing have been popular with both students and alumni. But this year, the pandemic took in-person networking events off the table.
“We didn’t want to give up on this process, so we shifted it to a virtual experience,” says Patricia Schroeder, Nurs ’75, Grad ’78, ’97, clinical assistant professor and director of strategic initiatives.
Instead of hosting events on campus, alumni and students came together in the fall on Microsoft Teams calls. Each call featured about 10 alumni, and students participated with their cameras off by asking questions live through a chat tool.
But can you really re-create the spark of an in-person conversation virtually? Based on what she’s seen this semester, Schroeder says yes.
“I think it was much more interactive than in-person,” she says. Students can type into the chat to ask questions and address individual alumni, even as the group conversation continues. “This chat function really allowed students to engage in a way where being together in person might have presented barriers. Every student who had a specific question could just fire it out.”
Hosting networking events online also allows alumni from around the country to participate. Alumni have called in not just from Milwaukee but also from North Carolina, Missouri and Michigan.
Tapping into the college’s alumni network is especially important as students prepare to begin their nursing careers amid a pandemic.
“All the rules are changing in health care,” says Dean Janet Wessel Krejci, who participated in the sessions. “It’s a really unnerving time.” Students have reported that virtual mentoring and networking have been heartening amid the uncertainty.
“They all left with new contact information and great insights,” Krejci says. “A number of students responded that they had been anxious about the job market in a world of COVID and felt much more confident that things would work out.”
Students adapt to remote learning
In March 2020, Steve Samuel, then a junior, was on a mission trip in Panama City, Florida, when he got the news: No more in-person classes for the rest of the semester.
“I remember leaving my apartment before that mission trip saying, ‘I’ll see you next week,’ to my roommate,” Samuel says. “After the trip, I had to come back to campus, move most of my things out and go back home. It was a big adjustment.”
Campus life came to a halt for students across campus, but for nursing students, the pandemic also interrupted clinical placements in hospitals, clinics, schools and other settings around Milwaukee.
Samuel, president of the Student Nurses Association, said the shift to asynchronous learning was challenging at first.
“Asynchronous was a term I’d never heard in my entire life. I’d never taken an online class,” he says.
Virtual learning initially took a toll on Samuel, who says online classes didn’t mesh right away with his personal learning style. “I’m a very auditory and visual learner, so when you lose out on that, it’s tough,” he says. Yet he’s found new ways to absorb the material, like reading his notes aloud and listening to recordings.
This fall, most nursing students returned to campus and continue to complete some course work online. After recovering from the initial shock of last spring, Samuel says he’s grateful to be back on campus — and he’s gotten into a groove with online learning.
“I see it more as a challenge than a setback,” he says. “It’s a chance to be a really good nurse. Nursing is rolling with the punches and learning how to navigate adversity.”
The pandemic has also reinforced Samuel’s calling to work in health care.
“[COVID] is like an invisible war, and nurses and health care professionals are our soldiers fighting,” he says. “I feel this sense of empowerment and pride, because that’s what I’m going to be doing.”
Nursing faculty lead the learning shift
Moving a classroom online is no small feat, but for the College of Nursing, the transition to virtual learning last spring went smoothly with help from faculty including Drs. Kristina Thomas Dreifuerst and Amber Young-Brice.
Both Dreifuerst and Young-Brice bring a wealth of expertise in virtual learning to the college, and the two worked with faculty and staff to quickly move courses, simulations and clinicals online when the campus closed in March 2020.
Young-Brice was already teaching nursing education courses online before the pandemic. When the rest of the college started to move online, she put together a SharePoint team site with teaching resources. “I became that go-to person for the quick questions,” she says.
“My biggest advice at the beginning was to think about what the students must know and what can go,” Young-Brice adds. “It’s not possible to take a face-to-face class and dump it all online and ask students to be successful.”
Teaching online requires intentionality, Young-Brice says, and Dreifuerst agrees — especially where clinical experiences are concerned. COVID-19 abruptly halted clinical rotations for students working in hospitals and clinics, and Marquette instructors switched to online simulations to re-create the experience of caring for patients.
The shift came with some benefits: Using online simulations, students can repeat a simulation multiple times to learn from mistakes and gain “brain muscle memory” around different procedures, Dreifuerst says.
“We were able to be really intentional and design experiences and clinical situations that many students would never experience if they were in traditional settings,” Dreifuerst says. “We were able to add some breadth and depth to clinical learning.”
Young-Brice says faculty are also taking advantage of the virtual classroom to connect students with additional resources and provide more flexible office hours.
“A lot of students didn’t feel comfortable going to face-to-face office hours, so now we might be getting a different segment of students who are more comfortable via email or online,” Young-Brice says.
Ultimately, the move to online learning is another embodiment of Marquette’s commitment to cura personalis, or caring for the whole person, Dreifuerst says.
“Some people get the idea that when you’re not together physically, you lose that human connectedness, and I think we’ve shown otherwise,” Dreifuerst says.
Clinicals change in COVID-19 era
Clinical experience is a core part of Marquette’s nursing curriculum. But in the spring of 2020, students were quickly pulled out of placements in area hospitals.
“The hospitals didn’t have enough personal protective equipment for both the students and the staff; it was a very unpredictable time, so the hospitals made the ethical decision to cancel clinicals until they felt they could protect all the health care workers and all our students,” says Dr. Sandi Van Den Heuvel, Grad ’18, assistant dean for undergraduate nursing studies.
As the PPE supply stabilized, nursing students started returning to clinical placements this past summer. Now, students are back in action and contributing on the front line of patient care.
In the fall, Marquette piloted a new approach to clinical placements in partnership with Froedtert Hospital. Nursing students traditionally work closely with their instructors during clinical placements. With this new approach, students are paired with a Froedtert nurse for more one-on-one interaction as they help care for a single group of patients throughout the day.
“It’s a win-win for both students and hospitals,” Van Den Heuvel says. “It’s helping to provide more care throughout the day, and a lot of these students are getting great experiences at the hospitals.”
Students don’t take care of COVID-19 patients; they work alongside nurses outside of the COVID-19 floors and ICUs.
“We’re really helping out areas that don’t have COVID patients but are still very busy,” Van Den Heuvel says. “There’s other things going on. There’s still the flu, people with heart attacks and other urgent conditions.”
More than 250 students were placed in fall semester clinicals, including 90 at Froedtert.
“The benefit for the nurses is they’re going to have someone close to completing their schooling helping them throughout the day and able to do some things independently,” Van Den Heuvel says.
As for students, Van Den Heuvel expects these experiences will affect them for the rest of their careers.
“Nursing students are learning at an unbelievable time in our history,” she says. “It’s important to not only help now and serve however we can, but also for their future knowledge, so they can be care leaders in the next pandemic that could happen in their career.”
Leading Milwaukee’s Alternate Care Facility
As COVID-19 spread through the U.S. in spring 2020, experts were already anticipating a “second wave” of the virus later in the year. Cities across the country, including Milwaukee, began constructing Alternate Care Facilities (ACF) to prepare. These facilities increase the number of beds available to patients and ease the strain on crowded hospitals.
Patricia Schroeder, Nurs ’75, Grad ’78, ’97, clinical assistant professor and director of strategic initiatives, was recruited as chief nursing officer for the Milwaukee ACF at Wisconsin State Fair Park. Construction on the 550-bed facility wrapped in April 2020, and the first patients arrived in October as COVID-19 hospitalizations surged around the state.
Moving COVID-19 patients from hospitals to the State Fair facility frees up hospital beds for the most severe cases, Schroeder explains. “The ACF provides a space for transitioning patients who are low acuity on the healing side but still need oxygen treatment.”
While preparing the ACF, Schroeder worked with the center’s leadership team to create processes for admitting and assessing patients, training staff and meeting patient needs — everything from food service to basic comfort.
Day to day, she oversees a team of nurses and communicates with hospitals around the state as they consider transitioning patients to the ACF.
The work keeps Schroeder on her toes. Patient numbers and hospitalizations fluctuate, so the ACF retains a team of nurses who are trained and ready to work if the center needs to flex up its staffing.
“Pat’s just an incredible leader,” says Dr. Sandi Van Den Heuvel, Grad ’18. “To run a facility like this and get it up and running as quickly and as organized as she did is a testament to the quality of the faculty and staff we have at Marquette’s College of Nursing.”
Hopefully, Schroeder says, the ACF will start to wind down operations after a few months. But in the meantime, this crisis-level intervention offers a safe space for patients on the mend. (Editor’s note: The Milwaukee ACF was decommissioned in March 2021.)
“We’re very careful about who we transition over here because COVID is a very volatile illness,” she says. “People can be fine and then take a turn. We want to be sure patients here are truly on the healing side of things.”
Schroeder says it takes a special kind of person to work on the front lines of health care right now, given the immense pressure of the work.
“The stress it creates for everybody, for every role, is tremendous,” she says.
When she asked an ACF staff member why he chooses to work at the facility, he told her, “This is a part of history, and I want to be a part of history.”
“It was so inspiring to me,” she says. “The call to serve is a really powerful thing.”
