MORGANTOWN – About 120 nurses from across the WVU Medicine system came to town Friday to learn about obstetrics nursing and improve their skills.
It was the WVU Medicine Golisano Children’s OB Nursing Symposium, held at the WVU Medicine Center for Nursing Education in the WVU Innovation Corp. building.
“This was kind of a dream of ours for some time now,” said Emmy McLaughlin, a perioperative nurse specialist at the Children’s birthing center.
The WVU system has 12 birthing centers, she said, but other facilities also care for obstetrics patients. And while the focus was on obstetrics nursing, other nurses came to learn too, she said: palliative and bereavement staff, clinic nurses and emergency nurses.
They learned about such things as labor, counseling, hypertension, hemorrhage management, and immediate and precipitous delivery. They heard from a panel including patients and family members on bereavement and loss, McLaughlin said.
“We see a lot of cheers, and that’s what most people think,” she said. “But there’s also a lot of tears in our line of work. And so that’s one of the bits of empowerment we wanted to give our staff. … We’ve tried to give a big range to reach all of our providers.”
The eight-hour symposium also included nine hand-on simulations in the school’s simulation rooms including lifelike robotic mannequins that simulate various conditions and can communicate with the nurses treating them.
One room featured a team resuscitating a newborn while another featured a hypertensive mom going into a seizure and not 100% sure where she was. The nurses comforted her and talked ot her while they tried to treat her symptoms.
