Nursing program celebrates success

By MARK SAGE/Staff

It helped that Justin Allen wasn’t exactly new to Johnston Memorial Hospital.
He’d worked there, on another floor, as a nurse’s aide before graduating the Neff Center’s licensed practical nurse program last year. When a position on the fourth floor, where he works now, opened up, he was offered the job and started the day after graduation.
That first day, he said, reminded him of class except for the fact that Neff Center teachers Connie Kinder, Julia Johnston and Susan Pennington weren’t there holding his hand. Still he felt pretty prepared. Though hand-holding wasn’t allowed, the teachers had gotten him ready, he said, made sure he knew what to expect, what to do to get into a routine, how to take care of patients “like you ought to.”
“I felt pretty comfortable that first day,” he said.
The Neff Center nursing program grew out of the Johnston Memorial School of Nursing. That program, according to Johnston, split in two with part going to Virginia Highlands Community College for an associate’s degree program and the other moving to the Neff Center at the start of the 1970’s.
“We have always been affiliated with Johnston Memorial Hospital,” Pennington said.
Johnston said the Neff Center’s graduates are some of the Abingdon hospital’s most loyal, long-term workers. However, she said it would be tough to go into any area of health care in the county – even the region – and not find a graduate of the program working.
“Most of our graduates are still in this area,” Johnston said.
Increasingly, Johnston and Pennington said, graduates are heading to work and to college to become registered nurses. Allen is one of them. He said he’s planning to start at Virginia Highlands Community College in the fall to become an RN.
The difference between LPNs and RNs, according to Pennington, is largely facility based. Either one can save your life, Johnston said. In acute-care facilities, Pennington said, LPNs cannot work as charge nurses – a sort of team leader.
Currently, 15 second-year students, all adults, are going through the program. Eighteen adults and 14 high school seniors are in the first year of the program. The seniors mostly come in the afternoons. The nursing program is the only one at the center that teaches adults, and Pennington and Johnston said they typically attract more adults, many already working in the health care field.
Johnston said word of mouth is a big factor in the program’s success. Plus, she said, it’s economical. There is no tuition. In fact, the only charges are for supplies, uniforms and books, about $1,500 for the entire two-year program, she said. After the two years are up, students, then LPNs, can begin working in hospitals, clinics, prisons, etc. There’s no shortage of places to work, according to Pennington, with the newly opened cancer center, recently opened clinics and an urgent care center, several hospitals and a couple of prisons in the works. And then there’s the quality.
“You will get top quality care,” Johnston said. “That’s what impressed me about the program.”
It’s not a college course, Pennington said, but the depth of study is college level.
Allen said the Neff Center course was rough, but thorough. The teachers made sure students were prepared, he said, and ready to work graduation day, or the day after, as the case may be.
For the 24-year-old Allen, the course at the Neff Center has meant the opportunity to go to school and on to work without ever leaving home. It’s a bonus, he said, to be taking care of the people you know and have known all your life.
“These are people you’re going to see at Wal-Mart or Food City,” he said.
Allen started as a fifth-floor aide about halfway through school. He said he got interested in the idea and decided to give it a trial run and ended up liking it pretty good. The fourth-floor, where he works now, is mostly surgical with some pediatrics.
His path to nursing isn’t so different. Pennington and Johnston said they hear all kinds of stories about why people are there.
For some, it’s a family tradition. And for some of those, it’s a family tradition born in the classroom. One year, Johnston said, the course had two mother-daughter sets studying at the same time.
“I think truly, truly good nurses are born,” Johnston said.
Something innate gets awakened along the way in those cases, she said. Often the catalyst is a sick relative.
Linda Osborne was 17 when she knew for sure she was going to be a nurse. Her grandfather was a patient at the hospital in Pulaski, and one nurse there stood out, making her want to work in the field. She enrolled at the Neff Center while a senior in high school and graduated as an LPN in March of 1971, the first class through the center. Osborne, a night shift worker, is one of two members of that first class.
This year, every student in the Neff Center classed passed their board exams. Back in 1971, Osborne said, all but one in that class of 12 did. Pennington said that in years past, when the individual results were made known to instructors, at least three students had perfect scores.
Things have changed over the past 37 years, Osborne said. In her early days, wards at the hospital held up to five patients each and most of the hospital was made up of wards. There were a few semi-private rooms but no private suites. More people were admitted back then, too, even for what is routinely an outpatient surgery. And the stays were longer, up to five days for the procedures that won’t give you a night today. Gall bladder surgery back then, she recalled, ended with a nearly two-week stay. Not only were there more patients back then – sometimes, she said, it was she her and an aide taking care of 32 patients overnight – but the job was more labor intensive. Most of the medicine in those days was given in the muscle or through the mouth.
A few things haven’t changed, though. It’s still a job where the nurses and aides, the teams on the floor day after day and night after night, become the face of the hospital. They are the faces the patients and families recognize and link to the hospital. It’s still a job that can change, life or death change, in a matter of seconds. And it’s still a job where training can make a difference in those seconds of change and those days and nights of being the face of the hospital.