“I saw people my age die that day and nothing in my training prepared me for that.”
This quote and others from new graduates caught up in Christchurch’s quakes were shared in a presentation to last month’s Australasian Nurse Educator’s Conference by Canterbury District Health Board new graduate co-coordinator Becky Hickmott and educator Fiona Davie.
In February, there were more than 105 graduates on nurse entry to training programmes (NETP) across Canterbury. Hickmott says with pride that only three have resigned since – two directly because of the quake as their partners had lost jobs and also lost their homes.
“They [the graduates] have been absolutely brilliant,” says Hickmott. The January intake was only three weeks into orientation when the most devastating of the quakes struck.
The ANEC address shared graduates’ stories of reassuring patients whose beds slid across the ward floor; of squatting in a toilet attending a patient thrown off the toilet and bleeding from skin tears as aftershocks continued; and of trying to comfort and console grieving and sometimes angry family members in ED. Some graduates themselves also lost family and friends.
In the days and weeks that followed, the new graduates, despite many having their own homes red-stickered or damaged, kept turning up to work never knowing which ward needed them or, for a district nursing new graduate, if they might have to walk for several hours to reach a patient cut off by severely damaged roads.
The NETP programme content itself had to be changed on the hoof with Hickmott seconded to Civil Defence. The immediate focus was placed on pastoral care of graduates and, with CPIT unable to deliver most of its courses, priority was given to the rapid assessment of the deteriorating patient course which graduates had found invaluable during the quake.
Davie and Hickmott said that seeing how the graduate nurses had responded post-quake had been a “huge confirmation” that patients would be in safe hands with tomorrow’s nursing workforce.
“They went through absolute hell and back. They have been such a wonderful bunch of graduates. They are very committed and did extraordinarily well under exceptional circumstances.”
