IUP’s Nursing and Allied Health programs are known to be VERY challenging.

They take a very limited number of students, and students must have a high grade-point average to be accepted. There are very intensive practicums and internships in addition to classroom study.

Frankly, I’m completely okay with that. If one of these students is, someday, somewhere, going to be at the control of my ventilator or dosing out my meds, I WANT the program to be hard. I don’t want these students to be “good enough.” I want them to be excellent.

So, that said, there is a shortage of nurses, not just in Pennsylvania, but in the nation. Some of our nursing students have a great potential to be amazing nurses, but they may be struggling in a course. Wash them out? Not so fast, Susan Poorman, Nursing and Allied Health faculty member, says.

Educators need to rethink attitudes about struggling students.

“As educators, we often believe that struggling students are not really motivated. They don’t care about learning; they don’t come to the teacher for help or attend test reviews. But one thing we have learned from listening to our students’ stories is that, often, they are not unconcerned but are immobilized. They just don’t know what to do to fix the problem,” Dr. Poorman wrote in a recent issue of Nursing Education Perspectives.

“Knowing this, I do not wait for students to come to me. I try to reach out to them. I send them e-mails to make appointments for special study sessions, to help them prepare for upcoming exams. When I am able to empower students to believe that they can attack their academic problems and successfully resolve them, it is a magical and uplifting experience.”

Hoping to understand more about students who are academically at risk, Dr. Poorman and colleagues then conducted studies on the experiences of students who struggle academically and the experiences of teachers who work with these students.

They found that, while evaluation is a challenge, it’s essential when working with at-risk students.

“I have seen that sometimes, the student’s struggle is greater when we, as educators, are not effective evaluators. Unfortunately, teachers are often pressed for time. We devote most of our time to preparing for class, which leaves little time to prepare high-quality assessments of learning.”

Promising work for struggling students and, certainly, promising news for the needs of the health care industry.

Dr. Poorman is just one example of IUP’s outstanding faculty members, who truly go the extra mile to help students succeed. She is among the inaugural fellows in the National League for Nursing and owns a small educational consulting firm, STAT Nursing Consultants, Inc., which employs five master’s and doctorally prepared nurse educators. The group helps students to reduce their anxiety and enhance their thinking skills on tests. She also has served as the advisor to IUP’s chapter of the Student Nurses’ Association of Pennsylvania.

Okay, back again, talking about one of my favorite professors and programs.

Jan Watcher, associate professor of Safety Sciences, who is currently researching how management needs to engage workers if they want them to follow safety guidelines, is a busy guy.

In addition to this work, a full load of classes, and advising students, one of his articles was selected for one of the most prestigious national safety journals, Professional Safety. His article is titled “Ethics–the Absurd Yet Preferred Approach to Safety Management.”

Any academic article that has the word “absurd” in it captures my attention.

As I’ve noted in a previous post, Dr. Watcher is a very articulate, well-rounded guy, who puts doing the right thing first. So I guess I’m not surprised by his topic. He is trying to tell management that yes, “the Golden Rule” (you know, we learned it in Sunday school, “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You” ) can be used as the basis for developing and implementing safety programs in the workplace without negatively affecting the bottom line.

 But Dr. Watcher goes a step further. He puts this responsibility on the safety professional. “Safety professionals need to have the moral courage to embrace ethical, not just regulatory, standards,” he says.

Let’s face it. Big companies are not always known for caring about the “little guy,” and sometimes, Dr. Watcher says, unethical managers try to enlist safety professionals as advocates for cutting corners when it comes to safety. If this happens, he says, safety professionals need to stand their ground and show their bosses how safety programs based on the more ethical basis of doing the right thing is a better and sustaining basis for managing safety programs in the long run.

I really liked this particular idea from the article: Laws and regulations are all about what people CAN’T  do, but ethics are about what people (and companies) SHOULD do.

Or, more simply put, ethics are about doing the right thing.

Dr. Wachter supports a “safety management systems approach” in the workplace: that is, recognizing the unsafe acts, unsafe conditions, and accidents are all symptoms of problems in the organizational management system. Safety should not be a “sunk cost,” but an integral function of doing business, just like quality.

But why would management adopt this approach, especially in light of challenging economic times?

“Perhaps the greatest economic reason to support an ethics-based approach to safety management within a capitalistic system is that prosperity generates an environment where continuing improvement and reduced risk are affordable,” Dr. Wachter says.

Pretty smart thinking.

But Dr. Watcher is a pretty smart guy. Here’s his professional training: a bachelor’s degree in biology, master’s degree in environmental health, Master of Business Administration, a doctoral degree in hygiene from the University of Pittsburgh, a Master of Divinity degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and a Master of Applied Theology from Wheeling Jesuit University. Before his academic career, he was employed by Fortune 100 companies and the federal government as an environmental safety and health administrator and researcher. His safety science accreditations include certified safety professional, certified industrial hygienist, certified hazardous materials manager, certified quality engineer, and certified reliability engineer.

I really like the idea of a Dr. Jan Wachter training the next generation of safety professionals. I feel a lot safer already!

I don’t really think much about safety in the workplace. Maybe because the most dangerous thing that could happen to me in my third-floor office in Sutton is that I get overly caffeinated (I love coffee and have my own personal Keurig).

But thankfully for people at job sites that have dangerous chemicals and machinery, there are people who do think very strategically about workplace safety.

I really enjoyed a recent meeting with Jan Wachter, associate professor of Safety Sciences. Dr. Wachter has a very diverse past, including study at a theological seminary. He’s not your typical safety professional, but he’s incredibly knowledgeable and has extensive experience in many different work sites. What intrigued me about his current work was that he was looking at safety from the perspective of the worker, not management.

Dr. Wachter got a $90,000 grant from the Alcoa Foundation to study “worker engagement” in the safety process.

WAIT! Don’t click away just yet. I promise, it’s interesting.

Here’s what that means. If workers have an accident, even if it’s because of a mistake that they make, it might not really be their fault, Dr. Watcher argues. It might be that they just aren’t buying into safety protocols and guidelines.

So the fault, dear reader, is not in their stars, but with management.

Here’s what he says: “While human error has been associated with the majority of incidents in the workplace, motivation and worker engagement may be the keys to human-error reduction.”

Dr. Wachter hopes that the outcomes of this research, once instituted in the workplace, could reduce lost workdays due to accidents by 20 percent.

The key difference in this study, as opposed to other research on safety in the workplace, is that Dr. Wachter will investigate how well–or how poorly–workers are engaged, or buying into, a shared accountability for identifying at-risk situations and responding to them.

There’s more about Dr.Wachter on the Research at IUP website, and I encourage you to stay tuned. I expect some very out-of-the-ordinary results from his research.