Hannah Kolinski, a 21-year-old nursing student from Oregon, is graduating early and about to start her first job in the Intensive Care Unit at ProMedica Bay Park Hospital, which has been designated northwest Ohio’s main site for treating patients with the coronavirus.
The University of Toledo student had already learned what the classroom could teach her and was just a couple months of homework and one state licensing test shy of starting her career when Gov. Mike DeWine ordered schools closed and social distancing best practices delayed state examinations.
That left her in limbo, until the university announced this week that it was giving hundreds of nursing and medical students who have completed their degree requirements the option to graduate one month early, and the state agreed to issue temporary licenses so students could start working right away.
Mrs. Kolinski jumped at the opportunity, immediately volunteering to head straight to the frontlines in the battle against coronavirus. UT approved her nursing degree on Friday and she accepted a tentative job offer with ProMedica, pending receipt of her temporary license from the state.
Then, the fight is on.
“I feel like I’m wasting my talents if I’m sitting on the sidelines,” Mrs. Kolinski said. “It’s a weird time to start working but when people need the most help is right now.”
That’s what nurses do, Linda Lewandowski, dean of UT’s nursing college, said. They rise to the challenge, even amid a scary and uncertain pandemic.
“I’m very proud of our students ... they still have their zeal and are caring and really want to make a difference, and they’re ready to do it,” Ms. Lewandowski said. “It’s normal to feel some trepidation going out into this health-care system, but despite that, they’re doing it anyway and that’s what nurses always do — they step up when they’re needed.”
UT previously said it had 275 nursing and medical students who had met degree requirements and were eligible for early graduation on Friday. Nearly half of them — 132 students — are in the nursing program, Ms. Lewandowski said, with 78 requesting early graduation.
Exact numbers for medical students were not immediately known, but the university previously said almost half of its fourth-year students had already matched with residency programs in Ohio, while other students are heading to some of the states hardest hit by the virus, like New York, Michigan, and California. In order to begin practicing, they must receive a medical license in the state in which they will be working and enter into their residency program early.
Eventually, students will have to go back and pass their state exams — the temporary license is only valid until 90 days after the end of the state of emergency, which was declared on March 9, or 90 days after Dec. 1, whichever comes first. The Board of Nursing will still require completion letters from all approved graduating students, as well as full background checks.
Today I accepted a job as an oncology nurse!!!! I’m feeling so happy and beyond blessed. Becoming a nurse in the middle of a pandemic is something I never even dreamed of but I’m ready for the challenge and i can’t wait to be the best possible nurse for my patients🙆🏼♀️💓 pic.twitter.com/OtfpIO2EMh
— Dara Artino (@TheDaraArtino) April 14, 2020
Under normal circumstances, Dara Artino, 22, would have followed a less punctuated timeline. She was going to celebrate her senior year, graduate from UT with her older brother, who is in a master’s program, and enjoy a bit of summer before testing and starting a job as an oncology nurse at ProMedica Toledo Hospital in August.
But these aren’t normal circumstances, and the hospital asked her to start right away, once her temporary license arrives. Her mother is a nurse at Mercy Health St. Charles Hospital. Ms. Artino felt it was her turn to step up.
“I’ve just been sitting here like, ‘what can I do to help people?’” Ms. Artino said. “I don’t want to go 20 years into the future and tell my kids that when this all happened I just sat in the house all day.”
Plans for the early graduations began when the state was still bracing for coronavirus infections to overwhelm area hospitals. Early modeling was predicting as many as 10,000 infections in the state per day at its peak and Mr. DeWine called for hospitals to start building out their capacity.
That picture quickly changed because Ohioans heeded the stay-at-home order. Infections appear to have since plateaued at numbers well below the initial projections — as of Friday, the state reported fewer than 10,000 infections total. Northwest Ohio hospitals also say they’re nowhere near capacity, and they haven’t even implemented their expansion plans yet.
But infection numbers are still rising and no one knows what will happen once Mr. DeWine begins to reopen the state after May 1. Hospitals continue to prepare for a surge.
“I do know they’re hiring and they do want our students to start as soon as possible,” Ms. Lewandowski said of area hospitals.
The Ohio Nurses Association recommends that hospitals look to first reassign experienced nurses who have been displaced due to cancellations of elective surgeries and other non-emergent care, before hiring young nurses with temporary licenses. At places like ProMedica, that is happening, spokesman Tausha Moore said, but more staff are needed to meet the typical 200 to 300 hires the health-care provider requires each year.
“This year is no different,” she said.
A quick search for registered nurse positions on the OhioMeansJobs website recently returned over 1,000 results, 105 of them within 20 miles of Toledo. For nurse practitioners, there were another 858 jobs statewide, 86 of them around Toledo.
The uncertainty surrounding coronavirus may frequently change how many nurses are being hired over time and the urgency with which they’re sought, but nurses will always be needed, Ms. Lewandowski said — “That’s not going to go away.”
The university will still hold an official, but virtual, graduation ceremony for nursing students on May 9 and for students of the college of medicine and life sciences on May 15.
First Published April 17, 2020, 8:45 p.m.
