DENVER — A Denver school is finding a solution for nursing students having trouble getting enough hours to complete their clinical hours to graduate.
Denver7 spoke with an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver to learn what motivates students to travel overseas to ensure they meet the requirements in Colorado to become a nurse.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of nurses left the industry because of burnout and other issues. That left a huge demand for nurses. However, today, students are having trouble getting the clinical hours they need, according to an assistant professor at MSU.
Doctor Katrina Little with MSU Denver says the demand from the medical field is high now, as they need nursing positions filled quickly. Little says students get close to real-life experience on campus, but working with real-life people helps with getting those clinical hours in. That’s why some students are taking two weeks to travel to Ghana, where they can get over 100 hundred hours to help them get across the graduation stage.
“So in the fall, we launched the international clinical pathway, and in that experience, we actually MSU Denver established a legal partnership as a clinical partner with Manna Mission Hospital in Accra Ghana,” Assistant Professor Katrina Little, who is the Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and population and community health nursing at MSU Denver.
Little says that it is out of the ordinary for a study abroad program to satisfy clinical requirements, but multiple people at MSU work to ensure that these nursing students' hours count.