Indian River State College has 443 nursing students, according to executive dean Dr. Patricia Gagliano, a healthy portion of whom are about to enter their field of choice after next week’s final exams.
The class reflects three years of growth after the IRSC Nursing Extension opened in the St. Lucie West Pruitt Campus. The facility graduated 151 students last year to replenish a lacking medical workforce statewide.
Its students stare down situations “from birth to death in any setting” among patients of all ages, Gagliano said. Its “patients,” though, are not people, rather lifelike mannequins that populate the approximately 11,000-square-foot facility and help emulate medical circumstances among all ages and physiologies.
“The scenarios can be tweaked to what they see in a hospital,” Gagliano said. “At any given time when a student looks, it looks just like a hospital: the lights, the sound, the equipment, it looks like a healthcare facility.”
The extension’s upkeep remains supported by a $3.25 million grant awarded Nov. 13 from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. This funding will buoy nursing instruction at the Pruitt Campus “over the next four years,” Gagliano said.
IRSC’s nursing program has grown more steadily since it moved from their Fort Pierce Massey Campus to the Pruitt Campus in 2023. The 11-room facility has given students time and space to focus on how best to approach a patient, from surgery to mental health.
An April 13 press demonstration showed what potential nurses, even close to final exams, go through before entering the workforce in a Florida that faces a medical staff shortage. “Nursing shortages aren’t abstract on the Treasure Coast,” said an April 10 IRSC release.
It’s 10:15 a.m. when a “code blue” sounds through the intensive care unit. Two students, Savannah Joiner and Manny Rodriguez, surrounded by instructors, receive a mannequin of a woman in her mid-50s clinically dead of an opioid overdose.
As the victim flatlines, both take turns giving the victim chest compressions – 30 strong, mid-tempo reps at a jot – and shocks from a defibrillator. Joiner cries out “clear” before each jolt courses through the victim’s body. After five minutes of CPR, the victim’s pulse returns. The nurses and instructors doff their gloves and applaud another life saved.
“It’s a team effort,” said Rodriguez. “Everybody’s got a task and we need to perform our individual task to accomplish and get where we want to go, which is to save the patient; and it depends on everybody.”
Joiner, who will graduate next week, enrolled in IRSC after spending years assisting cosmetic surgeons closer to her home in neighboring Okeechobee County. “Working with a plastic surgeon led me to love patient care,” she said.
Rodriguez, who moved to St. Lucie from Mexico in 2015, will, like Joiner, pursue further medical education at IRSC once he graduates next year. “Maternity has been something that has awoken my interest,” he said.
In the facility’s faux-maternity ward, Madison Kee-Fitzpatrick and Jayda Hill observe “Jane,” a pregnant mannequin showing preeclampsia symptoms. Both students, nearing the end of a two-year, four-semester Associate’s program, speak gently to her as they turn her on her left side to relieve high blood pressure.
Kee-Fitzpatrick follows her parents – a county fire captain father; a respiratory therapist mother; and County Sheriff first responder stepmother – into the medical profession. “We’re all in the background of healthcare/first responder,” she said.
Hill followed the career out of a love of lifesaving. “I love the science of how we can bring people back, as far as CPR goes, or just like this: preeclampsia, we’re trying to correct that and give her the best possible care.”
“Since I was born and raised here, I remember when Port St. Lucie was nothing and Tradition was nothing,” Kee-Fitzpatrick said. She added she saw more people move here with new housing developments. “I felt like I needed to contribute a little bit more to the community.”
“After 2020, Port St. Lucie just grew,” Hill said. “During COVID, it was really hard for a lot of people; I had a few of my friends that were nurses and new grads at the time. It was a very hard struggle for them. I think that’s part of why I also wanted to become a nurse.”