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You may notice a few new faces around the hospital today, as 35 nursing students begin their eight-week externship at UVA. Externs will complete two rotations of four weeks each, based on their preference and staffing needs throughout the institution. This revamped nursing externship program not only provides nursing students with valuable experience, but aims to create a pipeline of capable patient care technicians (PCTs) and registered nurses (RNs) at UVA.

Today’s exciting launch was the result of months of hard work and collaboration between many team members in Nursing, Recruiting, HR, and Compliance. We spoke with Susan Prather, RN, Nurse Manager, and Matt Houston, RN, Staffing Office Manager, to learn more about this new program that runs from May 31 through July 23.

Q: What was your partnership like on this project?

Prather: Matt is really fabulous at all things computer-related. I am the Leading with Heart “H” project leader and I have experience with our past externship programs. We were chosen to lead this initiative together. 

Houston: Susan is a very wonderful and inviting people-person, and I lack all of those characteristics. And what she lacks, I make up for as the person who organizes all the data. We work well together and know each other’s quirks, so doing this together was the best thing.

Q: Can you tell us a little about your first group of externs?

Houston: Our first group of externs are students at Piedmont Virginia Community College (14), UVA (9), Blue Ridge Community College (4), James Madison University (3), Lord Fairfax (1), Southside Virginia Community College (1), Sacred Heart (1), Radford University (1), and Randolph-Macon (1). We’ve placed them in 19 different units across the hospital, including General Medicine, Hem-Onc, Cardiovascular, Transplant, Neurosurgery, Surgical Trauma, and others.

Prather: Whether they’re pursuing an ADN [associate degree in nursing] or BSN [bachelor's degree in nursing], they all have one year left before graduating in May of 2023. We tried to placed everyone in units they’re interested in while also broadening their horizons by giving them a second unit with a different patient population.

Q: How do nursing students benefit from an externship at UVA?

Prather: Because of the pandemic, many nursing students have not had a substantial amount of actual patient care. This program acknowledges that gap and allows them to start off with the tools that they need to be successful as nurses. Even with the hands-on experience, they only take care of one patient throughout most of their nursing school career. Here, we’re giving them four patients for every shift, working side-by-side with a nurse. They'll learn everything that a nurse does on a day-to-day basis and will get that real-life experience of having to prioritize and manage tough situations like a patient who is crashing, an angry patient, or a grieving family member.

Houston: In the 15 years I worked for Susan, she always made sure all of my learning experiences were fruitful. It’s because of her that I am where I am today. With this externship program, we’re formalizing that opportunity I was lucky to have under Susan.

Q: Are you optimistic the externship program will be a success?

Prather: Yes! We’ve done externship programs in the past at UVA, but for one reason or another — budgets, lack of leadership buy-in, etc. — we had to put them on hold. We’ve learned a lot since then on how to streamline things. There’s now also tangible evidence to support the use of an externship program in combination with a nurse residency program to increase retention.

Houston: We honestly could not have done this without the support we’ve received from Kathy [Baker, Chief Nursing Officer] and Veronica [Brill, Associate Chief Nursing Officer]. They gave us the go-ahead and made sure we had the resources we needed to make the program a success.

Q: How will you measure results?

Houston: We’re fielding a survey of the externs both before and after their externships. So, we'll be able to see how much more clinically confident and comfortable they feel. We’ll also be sending out a survey to managers to see how it went. So far, they've been extremely excited to have an extra set of hands, because our PCTs and CNAs [certified nursing assisntants] are in very limited supply.

Prather: I really see this program expanding in the future. We had to close the position because we had so many applicants. We could easily hire 50 or more externs next time.