Nurse

Fiona Goodwin has seen just about everything in her 22 years of nursing, but nothing prepared her for the surprise of winning Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian?s Nurse of the Year Award Thursday. Goodwin, who is the care nurse in the hospital?s sub-intensive care unit, was chosen by her peers for exhibiting ?confidence and expertise in expert care,? her willingness to ?always assist other staff,? her ?can-do, positive attitude? and her ?patience and emotional intelligence,? to quote some of her nomination forms.

Are there differences between American and Chinese hospitals? Sure, but the nurses from China who visited Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian on Tuesday still thought what they saw was just about perfect. And they were quick to add that the differences they saw were just that — differences, no better and no worse. “It’s almost a perfect situation here. We’ve been waiting our whole lives for an opportunity like this,” Wang Cai Yun, president of the Chinese Assn.

Every adult in a public school is required to report child abuse when they see it. Problem is there’s some confusion about how to go about doing that. But on Dec. 12, all 26 school district nurses in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District will be trained on a policy for detecting child abuse and reporting it to the Orange County Social Services Agency. “Some places have an interpretation of what the rule is [regarding reporting],” said school nurse Karen Manning.

As California struggles to meet demands for new nurses, Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian honored its nursing education task force for the third-straight year Tuesday at a luncheon in Costa Mesa. The event, at the Turnip Rose at 1901 Newport Blvd., recognized community members who have contributed to the ?Choose Nursing, Choose Hoag? program, a task force of the Hoag Hospital Foundation that raises funds for nursing education. Carla Schneider, a nursing scholarship recipient, and Venice Keller and Jennifer Figuerroa, a mother-daughter team of nurses, were among those giving presentations.

When nurse Anita Lucero responds to an emergency sometimes the patient is violent, but her job is to gain control. First, she must calm the patient with words and gestures. She usually can’t expect much help from the patient as they often are in no condition to communicate with her. When a patient is so violent they’re dangerous Lucero doesn’t even have handcuffs or any other defense. Then she has to determine what caused the emergency and what needs to be done next — and this happens before any restraints or sedation is brought into the equation.

As a running back, Carlos Mendez has been conditioned to absorb hard hits, to keep his feet on the ground and his body moving forward. If rolling around a defender will gain an extra yard, it’s done. And so Mendez has become the Eagles’ workhorse, and that’s exactly how he’d like it, because it makes his football life congruent to everything he already knows. At 16, Mendez worries about the sort of problems even adults twice his age don’t always know how to handle.

UC Irvine’s new nursing science director would like to see UCI offer a master’s degree for nurses and possibly create new majors in cooperation with other schools. Ellen Olshansky took over UCI’s 1-year-old nursing school on Wednesday. She stressed the importance of producing more nursing students to fix the state’s nurse shortage. “California is desperate for nurses,” said Rick Martin, senior vice president of patient care and services at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian.

A year after Vanguard University launched a bachelor of science degree program in nursing, it has received strong community support and high demand from registered nurses. Vanguard created the program in collaboration with Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian and other major Orange County hospitals and community colleges. It received a $500,000 development grant in partnership with Hoag. "Vanguard's program is unique," said Rick Martin, senior vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer at Hoag hospital and founding member of VU's nursing program advisory board.

When Nicole Esquer decided she wanted to be a nurse, she knew exactly where she wanted to work. On Friday, the 24-year-old nursing student was hired at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, where she will attend to infants and their parents just as nurses served her 24 years ago, when she was a vulnerable newborn in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). "I knew Hoag was the only place I wanted to work," she said. "It's in my blood. My mom was born here, my sister and I were born here, and I intend to have my babies here."