No doubt, clinical rotations are an important aspect of your nursing education. They’re where you put into practice what you’re learning online in your didactic courses and in your simulation and skills labs. As such, we strive to maximize our students’ experiential learning opportunities in an actual clinical setting.
That’s why we have a clinical partnership with Saint Thomas in Nashville. Nurses affiliated with the hospital system remain not only committed to giving our students the best possible patient care experiences but to offering a unique perspective on the profession that goes beyond the bedside.
Additionally, as we continue to strive to offer our students unparalleled opportunities in their nursing education, we’ve also recently completed renovations to our Nashville site, conveniently located on the fifth floor of Saint Thomas West. That means you can expect not only a first-rate clinical partnership, but also state-of-the-art facilities to complete the other parts of your education.
Read more about our clinical partnership with Saint Thomas and the ways it adds value to your accelerated nursing school education below.
Saint Thomas: Our Partner in Nashville
As an accelerated bachelor of science in nursing (ABSN) student enrolled in our satellite program in Nashville, you will complete your skills labs and simulation labs in our facility at Saint Thomas West, then complete hours of clinical practice within the Saint Thomas healthcare network.
While you will still have the opportunity to complete your didactic courses through our e-learning platform anywhere, anytime, students say they find the hours they log on-site at Saint Thomas facilities to be invaluable to their nursing education. In fact, for many, Marian University’s ABSN program and Saint Thomas are one in the same:
“I think of Marian University as Saint Thomas’s nursing school, because we are the Marian students, we’re in this hospital 24/7. Our office is inside the hospital, and we do our clinicals with different sites within Saint Thomas Health,” says Laura Williamson, ABSN Class of 2015. “We are welcomed here. You can’t go anywhere in this hospital without seeing a Marian student in the cafeteria. … Saint Thomas is a home base for Marian University students.”
Our Home Base in Nashville: Saint Thomas West
Part of Saint Thomas Health, a leading not-for-profit hospital system in Tennessee, Saint Thomas West Hospital provides adult specialty healthcare to the more than two million residents of Middle Tennessee, Southwestern Kentucky, and Northern Alabama. It has:
- 541 acute care beds, including 40 critical care, 80 special care, and 140 telemetry beds
- 1,700 employees
- 750 affiliated physicians
- 21,388 total admissions per year
- 32,000 ER visits per year
With that large of a hospital network, you’ll have access to plenty of diverse clinical scenarios to round out your nursing education.
The Renovated Site
As part of Marian University’s commitment to providing access to the best possible ABSN program experience for our students, we recently renovated the Nashville site to make way for high-tech education equipment and facilities. Still within Saint Thomas Health West, it is now located on the fifth floor of the S and E Building. It’s split into two areas:
- One half is the administrative side, including a conference room, kitchen area, storage, and office space for on-site academic and admission staff.
- The other half of the space includes a classroom used for testing and skills lab as well as a student study area that includes a kitchen area, printer/copier, and textbook library for student use.
State-of-the-Art Labs
The new Marian University lab at Saint Thomas West consists of 24 patient care settings that include instructional and practice units, debriefing areas, technology, and equipment. It is designed to provide students a safe, risk-free environment to understand the foundations of nursing and health assessment.
The renovated facility also has space for students to learn about the more advanced areas of nursing practice, such as:
- Care of mothers and their newborns.
- Infants and adults experiencing acute, critical, and chronic health issues in community outpatient centers, clinics, hospitals, residential care facilities, hospice care centers, and home care settings.
Experiential Learning
The goal of your clinical experience as an ABSN student is to prepare you to be a practice-ready nurse. Through our clinical partnership with Saint Thomas, you’ll not only develop practical skills; you’ll learn how to communicate with patients and network with fellow healthcare professionals in a trusted hospital network.
“We did our clinicals at Saint Thomas, so I’m comfortable in that atmosphere. People know I’m a Marian University student, so they know how prepared I am. They trust me. That’s nice to have that, because when you are first starting off, you want everyone to have confidence in you,” Laura says.
Faith-Based Connection
As a Catholic institution, our ABSN students also benefit from a faith-based education. Like its Indianapolis counterpart, the ABSN program in Nashville incorporates the four Franciscan Sponsorship values into a blended online and on-site curriculum with a focus on holistic patient care. Those values are:
- Dignity of the Individual
- Peace and Justice
- Reconciliation
- Responsible Stewardship
Saint Thomas Health is also a faith-based institution and part of Ascension, the nation’s largest Catholic and non-profit health system, making our clinical partnership with the hospital system a natural fit. We share the same spiritually centered mission of delivering high-quality, compassionate care to the communities we serve.
Saint Thomas’s core values of service of the poor, reverence, integrity, wisdom, creativity, and dedication also resonate with our students, like Laura.
“[Talking about Franciscan values in lectures] prepares you for the type of things you are going to experience in a faith-based organization — how they care for their patients, how they speak of their patients, and how they approach their care,” she says.
Are you ready to join fellow ABSN students in a partnership committed to your successful future as a nurse? Contact us to learn more about our ABSN clinical healthcare partnerships in Indianapolis and Nashville.