Hospital beds fill a second-floor room at the Surrey campus of Kwantlen Polytechnic University and quiet patients wrapped in blankets lie in each one.

A group surrounds one of the beds, pulling a pastel-coloured curtain partially closed for privacy.

Today, the patient is having a urinary catheter put in place. It’s a procedure where a plastic tube is inserted into the bladder through the urethra.

A long-haired girl is draping the area, donning gloves, swabbing disinfectant and ensuring the tubing and anything that touches it remains sterile. She’s not sure she’s doing things exactly right, but that’s okay. She’s still learning.

The care provider is a nursing student in a lab and her patient today is a lifeless mannequin.

Working at two separate bedsides – one with a female dummy and one with a male – two small groups are putting into practice what they’ve just been taught in a classroom next door.

The group of a dozen or so young women have just begun their second year of training toward their bachelor’s degrees in nursing. Last week, they were in hospitals working with real, live patients, giving their first injections.

It was a more than a bit nerve wracking, admits one student.

Kwantlen offers two four-year nursing degrees: the Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) and the Bachelor of Psychiatric Nursing (BPN).

Nursing re-entry programs are also available for nurses who were educated in Canada but may have been out of the workforce for a awhile, and also for nurses who were educated outside of Canada.

Throughout their training, students complete a series of academic classes combined with practical training in the school’s innovative labs and on-site in hospitals and other health care facilities.

Their schooling includes everything from changing beds and patient dressings to inserting intravenous lines and preparing and administering prescribed doses of myriad medications.

Unique to Kwantlen is the use of simulator – or sim – technology: life-sized computer-controlled dummies that simulate symptoms of various illnesses.

The dummies can breathe, wheeze, have fast or slow heart rates, bleed and even produce tears.

Students can experience and be tested on potential medical scenarios and asked to respond accordingly. Based on their students’ analyses and diagnoses, instructors enter commands on a computer, thereby changing the pulse, blood pressure and other physical responses of the mock person. The health of the simulators can improve or decline and the dummies can even die if the wrong decision is made.

“You want to see if the student can think critically and treat the patient in the appropriate way,” explains Joyce Gabriel, one of three nursing lab instructors at the university. “We try to simulate as many situations as possible that they may encounter.”

Apart from learning to treat ill patients, nursing students at Kwantlen are also being exposed to non-nursing courses that consider society’s changing needs.

“What we’d like to see is a shift from sick care to health care,” says Claudette Kelly, dean of the Faculty of Community and Health Studies.

She says the program has made a deliberate move away from a medical model that over the years has become more reactive rather than preventative.

That’s why students in their third and fourth years of training are often put into day care and other grassroots community facilities where early intervention and education can be prescribed to the public.

“Nursing is playing a leadership role in what constitutes health,” Kelly says. “We need to take a broader view of what makes a person healthy.”

Training for a career in health care

Many private career training schools in Surrey also offer training in health-related fields.

About three dozen post-secondary schools in Surrey are registered with the Private Career Training Institutions Agency (PCTIA) – approximately one-third of which offer at least some health care training options.

Schools that offer programs 40 hours or longer with tuition of $1,000 or more are required to register with the agency under the Private Career Training Institution Act in order to provide consumer protection for students.

Sprott-Shaw is the oldest accredited private college in B.C. and has 16 campuses, including one in Surrey. It is considered the largest practical nursing and resident care trainer in the province.

Surrey-based Stenberg College focuses entirely on “health care and human services” programs and three years ago launched the Regional Online Diploma in Psychiatric Nursing, the first and only such program in Canada. The program allows students to learn and complete clinical practice in their own, sometimes rural, areas.

Programming at private colleges is usually shorter term and career-specific. The choices at local institutions are many, ranging from cardiology technologist, lab assistant, resident care attendant, rehab assistant and pharmacy technician to more administrative fields such as medical transcription, nursing unit clerk and medical office assistant. There are also local educational options to pursue dental and optics-related careers.

Other private schools in Surrey with health-related programs:

• CDI College of Business, Technology and Health Care

• MTI Community College

• Academy of Learning

• Surrey College

• B.C. College of Optics

• West Coast College of Health Care

• Vancouver Career College

For a complete list, check www.pctia.bc.ca

Kwantlen careers:

In addition to the nursing, Kwantlen Polytechnic University also offers the following health-related programs:

• Community support worker.

• Gerontology.

• Health unit coordinator.

• Home support resident care.

• In May, 2010, Kwantlen will also be offering a two-year baccalaureate degree in nursing for students who already have an undergraduate degree.