A nurse is usually the first person a patient sees during a checkup, when they go to the emergency room or when they wake up from surgery.
Nurses walk with patients through their journey to gaining back their health, and Southwest Mississippi Community College has been producing nurses who have been saving lives in the area for decades.
Dr. Melissa Temple, director of the college’s Associate Degree Nursing program and the incoming director of Southwest’s Practical Nursing program, said she is proud of the work her faculty has done.
Students who wish to enroll in the Practical Nursing program go through a yearlong course load that teaches basic knowledge of biology, psychology and sociology and is not as extensive as the required prerequisites for registered nurses.
Temple said the transitional program for students going from LPN certification to becoming registered nurses has the necessary supplemental courses.
The associate degree nursing program for registered nurses is very competitive, with demand for the program far outpacing the number of slots available for students.
Accordingly, the program is very selective.
Students who wish to enter it must have a minimum ACT composite score of 18, a 2.0 grade-point average and must pass an admission exam.
The students who score the highest are admitted.
“Let’s say we have 45 spots, then we would take the top 45 students that scored the highest,” Temple said. “We may have 80 students to apply, but all of them may not have qualified.”
The fall 2015 associate degree nursing class had a 100 percent passing rate on the NCLEX for registrered nurses after the first try.
“The average for the entire nation was 85 percent, so we even exceeded the average,” Temple said. “It’s an extreme accomplishment.”
Not many colleges — two-year or four-year — can say they’ve had a nursing program to achieve that score, but Southwest can, Temple said.
She said that in 2013, the NCLEX became a more difficult test, and a lot of colleges saw a significant drop in nursing students.
However, Southwest changed its curriculum to match the intensity of the test. Temple said they also began to do things to help students, such as giving them practice tests on computers in order to get them use to taking the timed test.
Temple said faculty also now give practice test that are up to 240 questions.
“With the NCLEX, you may be randomly selected to take the 240 question test or you may be given 75 questions. It all depends on them,” she said.
She said faculty have created longer tests to test the students’ endurance.
“We make sure they can handle sitting there that long,” she said.
Temple said the program also uses a teaching mannequin full of sensors known as “Sim Man” and a child-size version known as “Sim Junior” as part of the training.
“The mannequin tells them when they’re hurting or when they’ve received medicine,” Temple said.
She said students get upset when they make a mistake on “Sim Man, “but I tell them he’s not real,” she said. “It will stick with them and they won’t make it again.”
Temple said the biggest thing students must learn is the mental aspect of nursing.
“We talk about test taking, we talk about developing good study habits. You have those students that say, ‘I didn’t have to study.’ Well, you have to study here,” she said. “Nurse’s test are different from anything they’ve ever taken.”
Temple attributes the success of the program to its faculty, who complete continuing education classes and learn more about the field in order to teach students.
Temple said anyone considering a job in nursing should know it’s a wide-open field, with a variety of job settings.
“When a student graduates, they have a good idea of what part of the field they want to go into,” she said.
