Last Updated on April 20, 2021 by Ivy Tech Kokomo
SOURCE: News release from Ivy Tech Kokomo
KOKOMO, Ind. — Between them, these five members of Ivy Tech Kokomo’s nursing faculty have accumulated 84 years of experience in the nursing profession. Their years of service in the field range from six to 33. They’ve provided patient care from nursing home rooms to emergency rooms, in jobs ranging from nurse’s aide to psychiatric mental health nurse to supervising a hospital’s nursing staff. They’ve earned everything from certificates in Practical Nursing to master’s degrees in nursing specialties.
And they have each funded a hospital bed in Ivy Tech Kokomo’s new Health Professions Center to help provide high-tech, hands-on, real-life experience for the nursing students they all teach and mentor.
Three of the faculty members – Brian Arwood, Katie Douglass, and Lacy Kiel – have funded beds for mannequins in the Nursing classroom and lab where beginning students can practice skills like making physical assessments and taking vital signs, providing wound care, administering medication and injections, and caring for tracheostomies and nasogastric feeding tubes. Here, students learn the basics – how to raise and lower the bed, how to extend footboards, how to weigh patients. These new beds, complete with bedside tables, mimic the patient environment students will find in modern hospitals.
Two of the “senior” faculty members – Lisa Price and Starr McNally – have underwritten two of the three beds in the Nursing program’s “sim lab.” Here, higher-level nursing students will have the opportunity to work with very high-fidelity mannequins whose blood pressure, heart rates, and oxygen levels can fluctuate at the flick of an instructor’s fingers on the controls. Based on commands coming from the control room, these mannequins can cough, cry, moan, bleed, and open and close their eyes. Students can set them up for IVs, take blood samples, hook them up to monitors, administer oxygen – all simulating an actual patient care experience.
The new facilities and up-to-date equipment are especially appreciated by the Ivy Tech faculty members after all the challenges they’ve faced in the last four years. The College’s healthcare education facilities, then located at Inventrek, were destroyed by the August 2016 tornado that tore through south Kokomo. The Nursing program was housed in temporary facilities around the campus until the new Health Professions Center was completed last year.
“Our faculty really stepped up as we quickly put together temporary facilities after the tornado,” said Dean McCurdy, chancellor of Ivy Tech Kokomo. “Because of the faculty’s dedication then, our students continued to receive quality education. Now, with our new Health Professions Center – and equipment these faculty members have supported with their donations, our students will benefit for years to come.”
The chancellor also noted that hospital beds in the Nursing labs have also been funded by Nancy Heckard Rhodes, a retired Logansport nurse who has been a long-time supporter of Ivy Tech and is a member of the Ivy Tech Foundation Board of Directors, and Marian Henry, a retired dean of Nursing at Ivy Tech Kokomo. Donors are being sought to underwrite six additional beds.
For more information on the $43 million Kokomo Campus transformation and the campaign to raise $3 million in local support, contact Kelly Karickhoff, executive director of resource development for Ivy Tech Kokomo, at kkarickhoff@ivytech.edu or 765-252-5501 or go to the campaign website at ivytech.edu/kokomotransformation .