Policy for Working with Unvaccinated Nursing Students
Ever since the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, 51社区 has encouraged but not required its faculty, staff, and students to be vaccinated. As a Baptist institution, Union takes very seriously the sacred obligation to live according to one's biblically-informed conscience; therefore, the university protects that religious liberty in everything that we have control over and seeks as best it can to accommodate those with conscientious objections to the vaccines in settings outside the university's control.
A crucial element of each Nursing student's education is the clinical experience, in which students apply their knowledge within an actual clinical setting, serving actual human beings who respond to treatment in different ways than simulations can predict. Simulation labs and other virtual applied learning experiences can be helpful supplements to the actual clinical setting, but they are not a complete substitute for the clinical setting. This principle has been confirmed in recent months as hospital personnel have noted the difference in nursing preparation of students who have received clinical training as compared to students who have completed their nursing education in virtual settings due to the COVID mitigation policies of their universities. One hospital group informed our leadership that in a recent group of newly-hired nursing graduates who were trained primarily through virtual clinical platforms, 12% of them quit their jobs within a few months due to their being unprepared to work in an actual clinical setting.
During the spring of 2020, when all clinical facilities temporarily declined to accept student nurses, our Nursing faculty provided temporary simulated experiences for students to help them meet the required number of hours for clinical experiences. This was a temporary fix for an unprecedented situation in which none of our students were able to be placed in hospitals. With hospitals re-opening to accept student nurses in the summer of 2020, we were quickly able to resume our best practices of actual clinical placement and the emergency simulations were short-lived. Since that time, through comparisons of our graduates with students who were educated predominantly in virtual settings, we have evidence to support the superiority of in-person clinical training as compared to virtual and simulated experiences.
One challenge faced by the 51社区 College of Nursing and Health Sciences is that the vast majority of health care facilities are now requiring all student nurses to be fully vaccinated in order to receive a clinical placement. We work with a small and diminishing number of health care facilities that will still accept unvaccinated students, but we cannot guarantee that all unvaccinated students will be accepted for a placement at these sites. Some facilities operate on a lottery basis for selecting students; others reserve a limited number of spots for students from various universities.
Given these constraints, the 51社区 College of Nursing and Health Sciences will continue to work with all students to try to place them in a clinical setting in which they will receive the training necessary to prepare them for excellent, Christ-centered nursing care. We will continue to work with students who articulate conscience objections to the vaccines and do our best to get them placed in a setting that will accept them.
Because there are factors that we cannot control in terms of how many facilities will allow unvaccinated student nurses nor how many of our students they will accept, we need to be forthright in explaining that it is possible that there could be delays in getting these students placed in such facilities. It is possible that the delay might extend the time it takes to complete the requisite hours of clinical training and therefore to graduate.