Student Nurses Shadow Mentors for Taste of Real-Life Motivation

Susie Snellgrove watched impassively with arms folded as Dr. Thomas Buhl sliced open the patient’s chest with an electric surgical knife.

Inside the cavity, a small purplish triangle quivered slightly like a soft glob of gelatin. Buhl widened the incision with a special saw, then attached tubes to the superior and inferior vena cavae using white tape. Finally, when everything was ready, he gave a signal and two technicians started the heart-lung machine that would keep the patient alive for the next three hours. A maze of clear plastic tubing jerked with pulsing gushes of the patient’s bright red blood.

The trembling triangle was the heart of a 12-year-old boy. The surgeon’s mission: to enhance the child’s chances for long-term survival by repairing a hole in it by open heart surgery.

“It’s just unbelievable,” said Snellgrove, a 22-year-old nursing student at Long Beach City College. “Talking about it in class is different from actually seeing it.”

Welcome to the LBCC nurse mentor program, an innovative local response to an ongoing national problem. The problem: An increasing shortage of nurses that threatens to plunge the national health care industry into chaos. The response: An attempt to help solve that dilemma by motivating future nurses to stick with their studies.

The program’s inspiration, said Kay Turner, associate dean of occupational programs at LBCC, came from the fact that the number of dropouts among students in the college’s two-year nursing program recently jumped dramatically. Until 1986, she said, the dropout rate averaged about 20%; last year it rose to an all-time high of 33%. That corresponds to national trends both in dropout rates and enrollment decline, which the National League of Nursing estimates has fallen 22% in the past two years.

Turner attributes the high attrition rate to several factors, most notably that women who have traditionally gone into nursing can now get higher-paying jobs with more reasonable hours. In addition, she said, with hospital stays getting shorter and more and more procedures being done on an out-patient basis, those patients who do end up in hospitals tend to be sicker, which makes the nurse’s job harder.

The dropout rate is terrible, Turner said. “It made us very uncomfortable and we knew we had to do something different. I got the idea in the middle of the night.”

Turner’s idea, simply put, was to pair nursing students with professional nurse mentors capable of encouraging the students when they’re down and instilling realistic expectations regarding the profession.

“Sometimes if you just get a good word at the right time, you’ll keep at it a little longer,” Turner said. “The mentors all know how tough (being a student) is; they’ve been there. They can be reassuring and sometimes that is all a person really needs; this is a one-on-one fix.”

The potential benefits are obvious, she said. The students graduate. The college thrives. And nurse-starved hospitals recruit new talent.

Apparently those arguments worked on area hospitals, which in a matter of months coughed up a volunteer mentor for each of the 200 students enrolled in the college’s two-year nursing program which qualifies graduates to take the state exam for registered nurses. The mentor program began six months ago, Turner said, and initially relied primarily on telephone communication between mentors and “mentees.” Although no policing was done, she said, nurse-mentors were encouraged to call their charges at least once a week to begin developing a give-and-take relationship with them.

Some of those relationships flourished. A few mentor pairs had lunch together. Others began socializing.

And this week the project entered new territory by holding its first Shadow Your Mentor Day, during which about 100 second-year nursing students spent entire working shifts alongside their nurse-mentors at six area hospitals.

“They have experience and we have none,” said Janet Lambos, 25, a student assigned for the day to the intensive care unit at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach. “I have trouble with organization sometimes. By watching her do it, I can see how it’s done.”

Said Mary Ellen Hendricks, 38, a nurse for 17 years and Lambos’ mentor: “When I went through nursing school I didn’t have anybody to talk to. This helps alleviate some of the problems. She’s free to call me anytime.”

Other hospitals participating in the project are Torrance Memorial Medical Center, Long Beach Community Hospital, Memorial Medical Center of Long Beach, Pacific Hospital of Long Beach and the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Long Beach.

Students visiting those institutions stalked their mentors during day and night shifts at the six hospitals in a variety of departments including pediatrics, labor and delivery, emergency, X-ray, oncology, orthopedic surgery and cardiology. While the students were permitted to perform minor tasks, such as making beds and changing diapers, organizers stressed that the emphasis of the experience was on simple observation.

For Snellgrove in the operating room at St. Mary, however, even the observing was dramatic. There, standing on a riser at the head end of the operating table, she watched wide-eyed from behind a white surgical mask as Dr. Buhl and his 10-member team stopped their young patient’s heart, spent three hours successfully making the needed repairs, then jolted it back to life again.

“This is a neat area to work in,” the student concluded when it was all over. “I got to see more of what the nurse actually does.”