Medical Training
In addition to growing future doctors,
NH Jacksonville also offers two
nurse-training programs: Certified Registered
Nurse Anesthetist Program and
Perioperative Nurse Course. About 40
Navy nurses participate in the hospital’s
three-month perioperative course which
is designed to provide Navy nurses with the specialized knowledge and skills
needed to provide the comprehensive
care needed for patients before, during
and immediately after surgery. The
Graduate School of Nursing at USUHS
offers a 30-month master’s-level Nurse
Anesthesia Program which begins with
a year of classroom training at USUHS
followed by 18 months of clinical, didactic,
and research training at a clinical
site. Three to four nurse anesthesia
students are assigned each year to NH
Jacksonville’s site.
Cmdr. Brent Bushey, who is the
NH Jacksonville site director for the
anesthetist program which will become
a doctorate-level program in 2013, explained
that along with the instruction
at NH Jacksonville, students get real-life experience with high-acuity patients
at facilities including Shands, Flagler
Hospital, and Kosair Children’s Hospital
(ranked among the top children’s hospitals
nationwide).
“Our goal is to prepare nurse anesthetists
to function in more medically
complex and acute settings around the
world. This is especially important, as
most of our certified registered nurses
deploy to support the fleet after their
first year, which can mean being the
sole anesthesia provider for an aircraft
carrier that may have 5,000 personnel
onboard,” says Bushey.
Another way NH Jacksonville prepares
Navy nurses is through highfidelity
simulation and skills labs.
Using mannequins to simulate patient problems such as complications during surgery and the birth of a child, the
hospital staff is able to better educate
nurses in acute care situations through
realistic role-playing, simulations and
thorough de-briefs. Skills labs include
training using mock scenarios to help
nurses use problem-solving abilities to
treat patients.
Collaborating with Shands (since
1998) and Orange Park Medical Center
(since 2011)—12 to 18 nurses participate
in two-week rotations to gain
hands-on experience with emergency,
trauma and critical care patients. For
these nurses, it means being part of that
hospital’s staff for the two-week period,
working with the most acute patients
in areas such as neonatal intensive care,
trauma and cardiovascular units, and
labor and delivery.
Lt. Cmdr. Cindy Beltejar, a nurse
who heads up NH Jacksonville’s Maternal
Infant Unit, participated in two rotations
at Shands in 2010. One month
after completing her second two-week
trauma rotation, she deployed to a trauma
unit at Forward Operating Base Lagman
in Afghanistan in January 2011.
Since NH Jacksonville is not a level-one
trauma hospital, the training experiences
available at Shands and other facilities
better prepare her and other staff
to deliver front-line medical care. “We received approximately 500 trauma-level
patients alone during my deployment
there—80 in just one month,” Beltejar
said. “While the cases presented at U.S.
based hospitals are different than those
resulting from war, the treatment of
trauma patients is the same. And the
trauma experience I gained at Shands
was invaluable and better prepared me
to care for some of the most critically
wounded casualties of war of all ages
while I was deployed to Afghanistan.”
Along with the two-week clinical
rotations Beltejar and other staff are fortunate
to participate in, NH Jacksonville
collaborates with the local medical reserve
unit (Operational Health Support
Unit Jacksonville), Orange Park Medical
Center, Shands and Baptist Health
on a two-day Trauma Nursing Core Course (TNCC). By pooling resources,
the course is offered to nurses from the
Navy and community hospitals four
times a year – allowing 24 nurses from
each facility to participate each year.
The TNCC is aimed at nurses with limited
access to trauma patients to better
prepare them to be essential members of
the trauma team.
All-in-all, almost 150 military and civilian
students receive training throughout
NH Jacksonville every year. More
than 100 training agreements with local
and national universities, colleges and
medical organizations make these learning
opportunities possible—from physical
therapy students from the University
of North Florida to family medicine
residents from the Mayo Clinic.
And NH Jacksonville’s role in growing
our nation’s healers doesn’t stop with
graduate-level education. A handful
of students from Darnell Cookman
Middle/High School participate in the
hospital’s intensive five-day Science,
Service, Medicine & Mentoring (S2M2)
Program each year. These students get
real-world experience in patient care areas
including the emergency and operating
rooms, pharmacy, and physical and
occupation therapy.