Nursing students now have the opportunity to add anesthesia specialities to their resumes as The Marquette College of Nursing aims for expansion with the reveal of their new graduate program.
The college plans to launch the new three-year nurse anesthesia educational program August 2017. The goal is to prepare Marquette nursing students to understand all areas of health care.
Lisa Thiemann, the program director, said the idea for the program sparked when the leaders of the college began to look at the significance of advanced practice nurses in modern healthcare. She also said the program hopes to help graduates attain skills needed to become positive agents for change in their environment.
“What a graduate of this program will be able to do is come forward into the clinical environment, the operating room environment and those healthcare facilities as expert clinicians in the nursing anesthesia specialty and also contribute and collaborate across the interdisciplinary environment to enhance patient outcome,” Thiemann said.
To make the program happen, the college received support from the Medical College of Wisconsin and Froedtert Hospital.
The creation relied heavily on its accreditation. “The faculty here and the dean were in the process of developing what’s called a self study, demonstrating that we have the capacity and the resources to (sustain a program like this),” Thiemann said.
Sarah Bergen and Stephanie McArthur, both sophomores in the College of Nursing, said they have mixed emotions about the new program. “I like that they’re expanding,” Bergen said. “I feel like they don’t have a lot of grad programs for nurses here.”
However, both said they were disappointed with the lack of advertising for graduate programs that Marquette offers. McArthur and Bergen said the only way they’ve received information about their options is by researching on their own.
After taking a look at the curriculum, Bergen and McArthur were surprised by the intensity of each semester of the graduate program. “It looks like hell,” Bergen said.
She also said she felt that for students who are required to have experience in nursing, there are a few courses that may be unnecessary repeats of undergraduate coursework.
The curriculum includes a total of 91 credit hours spread out over three years including fall, spring and summer semesters.
McArthur said she wasn’t pleased with the amount of summer courses. “I feel like nursing school is rigorous enough, and adding in summer would just make for a lot of unhappy people,” she said.
McArthur also said the program doesn’t fit for people interested in a part-time option. “Some people have families and get married and I just don’t see (the program) correlating well with, like, a mom.”
