FAYETTEVILLE : Wanted: Hispanic student nurses
Posted on Tuesday, June 17, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — After Kassy Berumen’s aunt went to the hospital last year, her mother spent hours online, quickly schooling herself in vocabulary related to chronic heart conditions.
Berumen’s aunt speaks only Spanish. Her nurse spoke only English.
It was up to the family to fill in the communication gaps.
Ask her mother to interpret a dinner-table discussion, and she’ll do just fine, Berumen said. Ask her to explain complex medical instructions and anatomic terminology, and she’ll need to do more than a little research first.
The family’s experience reflects a greater dynamic in Northwest Arkansas, state health officials said. As the region’s Hispanic population swells, the migration of new residents isn’t reflected in its nursing population.
That’s why education directors with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences invited Berumen, a ninth-grader at Springdale’s Central Junior High School, and a dozen other Hispanic junior high school students from Northwest Arkansas to five days of seminars, tours and hands-on lessons related to careers in medical fields this week.
The Northwest Arkansas program, called CHAMPS or Community Health Applied to Medical Public Services, is one of six in the state.
“I don’t want you to think that only white women can be nurses,” said Tom Kippenbrock, director of the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. “That’s just not true. Our goal is to reflect society.”
Kippenbrock spent about four hours Monday showing students how to measure blood pressure and take pulses while also explaining unusual nursing fields, such as military nursing. The students will spend the rest of the week touring optometrist’s offices, learning about drug and alcohol abuse and visiting an orthopedic office to watch a cast being applied.
The UA campus is part of a Northwest Arkansas Nursing Education Consortium with Northwest Arkansas Community College and Northwest Technical Institute. Nursing program directors from the three schools work together to fill nursing shortages with a goal of recruiting at least 48 Hispanic nurses to their entry-level classes within the next five years.
The students will make up less than 10 percent of the 400-student total among the three institutions, Kippenbrock said, but the goal is still lofty. He can count the number of Hispanic students in UA’s 200-student program on one hand.
The consortium seeks to attract students before they reach high school, giving seminars on nursing to children and parents as young as third grade.
Jo Ann St. Romain, director of education at the northwest branch of the UAMS Arkansas Health Education Cooperative, said the shortage of Hispanic nurses fits into a greater need for medical professionals.
By 2015, the United States will need 381, 000 additional nurses, a number that’s expected to double by 2020, she said. The need is even greater in growing minority populations.
“Since we have a significant amount of Hispanic people, we desperately need more Hispanic and bilingual nurses,” St. Romain said.
CHAMPS is funded through a grant from the Northwest Arkansas Care Foundation that also pays for medical interpreter training for area hospitals. The foundation also helps support the Bilingual Nursing Scholarship Initiative, which provides $ 2, 000 a semester for nursing education for students bilingual in English and Spanish, Marshallese or Hmong.
“Right now, there’s not enough interpreters, and some family members are interpreting,” she said. “That’s just not appropriate.”
On Monday, Berumen switched with ease between English and Spanish, laughing with a friend as she struggled to find a pulse on her inner elbow. Before CHAMPS, she’d never considered nursing. Now she might give it a try. “I just really like helping people,” she said.
To contact this reporter: eblad@arkansasonline. com
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