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Mercy’s SoutheastHEALTH College of Nursing and Health Sciences is celebrating a milestone – 100 percent of their winter 2023 and spring 2024 nurse graduates passed the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) to become a registered nurse (RN).
“The support they had for one another is not something you see in every class,” said Amy Beussink, a 25-year nursing veteran and program director of registered nursing at SoutheastHEALTH College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “As a faculty, we educate and support our students, and we encourage those relationships, but this group really ran with it.”
Aimee Linares, a spring 2024 graduate, completed this two-year program as a wife, mom and full-time student. Now, she’s an RN with the cardiac progressive care unit at Mercy Hospital Southeast.
“The NCLEX is like no exam you’ve ever taken,” Linares said. “The questions are not black and white. It’s like a puzzle. They’re giving you a bunch of pieces, and you have to make it make sense. My education at SoutheastHEALTH College had me ready to put that puzzle together.”
The curriculum of the registered nursing program at the college, which is part of Mercy Southeast, is designed to prepare students academically and clinically to take the NCLEX – a nationwide exam for licensing of nurses – and begin their health care careers. Students have access to outstanding clinical and educational resources, individualized instruction from experienced faculty, and invaluable hands-on experiences. The college also offers many other health care career field paths including radiologic technology, surgical technology, medical lab science and many others.
“I was looking for a more intimate class size,” Linares said of her choice of SoutheastHEALTH College of Nursing. “There are some classes you can go into with hundreds of students, which kind of means sink or swim. Our class sizes were much smaller. The teachers were available to help if we needed it. It’s still very intense. It’s nursing school, but the way they set it up here makes it much more manageable. It’s a safe place to learn from any mistakes.”
Beussink added, “Our instructors do a very good job of creating an interactive classroom and clinical judgment models where students really have to apply what they’re learning because a lot of these NCLEX questions involve patient-based scenarios that we’ll experience during actual patient care.”
Students are also taught to assess the patient first rather than rely on equipment readings and to ask themselves “Why?” repeatedly to ensure they’re making safe decisions in a clinical setting.
Linares is now working on her Bachelor of Science in Nursing as a student in the RN to BSN program through the college. She started her health care career a few years ago as a patient care technician at Mercy Hospital Southeast while she was enrolled as a full-time student.
“I felt like that experience was important to help me be prepared,” Linares said. “For some in nursing school, it's their first experience being in a hospital and being in that room. It can be scary, and I thought it would be good for me to start as a tech because you deal with a lot. It helped me learn to interact with patients as well.”
Linares learned resiliency skills during her work as a patient care technician at Mercy Southeast, but the college is ensuring all students have the same opportunity. One of the school’s newest initiatives is adding resiliency into course objectives.
“We’re beginning to teach students how to be resilient in the sense of good diet, taking care of themselves before they’re at the bedside taking care of the patient, communicating and being positive,” Beussink said. “It’s more tools for their toolboxes.”
For future students at SoutheastHEALTH College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Linares offered a bit of advice.
“Take it one day, one class, one assignment at a time. Don't be afraid to ask for help.”
To learn more about SoutheastHEALTH College of Nursing and Health Sciences and its catalog of health care programs, visit www.sehcollege.edu.
