SUMTER, S.C. — Training the future nurses is what the University of South Carolina (USC)’s Sumter campus is celebrating tonight. The school is hosting their grand opening of the skills laboratory and classrooms.
Rosa Hernandez says she wants to be a nurse “to advocate for people,” especially after her father passed away this spring.
“I feel like more things could have been done for him, so I want to be that advocate for patients. To get things done and to just advocate for their health in general and give them comfort and care,” Hernandez shares. “So that’s why I want to be a nurse.”
Now because of USC Sumter’s new nursing program, Hernandez is able to pursue this career along with her classmates Gauge Morgan and Laura Boquist. The group is in their first year of nursing school, honing their skills at the school’s new skills lab.
“It's good to practice our skills on the mannequins before we actually go to go to clinicals and practice on real people, that way we can just get a feel for it with the mannequins,” Morgan explains.
“It's a really great way for nursing students to learn,” Nurse Administrator Tina Simenson adds.
Simenson is the program manager. She joined USC Sumter in 2020, using her decades of nursing experience at Prisma Health’s Tuomey Hospital to help build the school’s program.
“As a nurse leader, we were constantly battling the nursing shortage, trying to keep travelers out of our facility and trying to keep a high-quality nurse at the bedside. And sometimes that's a challenge because there is a need for nurses right now,” Simenson explains.
Helping with that nursing shortage while hoping to keep nurses in and around Sumter is the program’s goal, Simenson says.
“Students tend to build relationships wherever they go away to go to school. So they go to Columbia, and they build relationships with the facilities, the healthcare facilities that are there, then they might decide to go there to work when they graduate and they don't come home,” Simenson details. “So this was a way for us to maybe grow our own nurses and bring them back to the community.”
“As we looked around in the community, we found that a lot of people leave town to study, and they don't come back,” USC Sumter Dean Michael Sontag says about starting the program. “And so starting this program, we figured it was a way to grow our own. And folks from the community can come here and get trained and stay, you know, take their field work, those sort of things, get jobs and stay in the community.”
With the program still in its early stages, Sontag says, “the proof’s in the pudding at this point.”
“We graduated our first cohort of students,” Sontag continues. “All of them passed their nursing test with flying colors, and all of them had jobs. And that's all fine and dandy, but they have jobs in our community. They went to work in the local hospitals, in the local nursing care facilities, those sorts of things. So we're already proving that this is a necessary program.”
Until this program started, Sontag says Central Carolina Technical College offered an associate’s degree. For people interested in a four-year program, however, Simenson says a bachelor’s degree in nursing can provide more opportunities.
“The bachelors-prepared nurse prepares you for more of a leadership role,” Simenson explains. “A lot of hospitals now will not allow you to promote beyond the bedside unless you have that bachelor's level, even to be an assistant charge nurse or a charge nurse. Anything that you want to do beyond the bedside you pretty much need a bachelor's degree to do.”