YouAlberta
The U of A’s new brand story video, Leading with Purpose, shows a nursing student practicing on a model patient. The student, Genieva Slomp, ’17 BScKin, is alone, practicing an IV pump technique in the evening hours. She runs through it over and over to perfect it.
That dedication to getting it right is not just acting. It comes from her experience in the class and out in the world.
It’s Slomp’s open heart that drew her to the University of Alberta’s after-degree nursing program. This figurative turn of phrase has a literal side, too. After finishing her first degree in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, she found herself in need of open-heart surgery at the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute. The experience changed her.
“I felt like something was missing in my career to that point,” says Slomp. “I wanted to be more involved with patients in a critical care sense. Then the surgery was the deciding factor. After I received the care that I did, I realized that nursing is for me.”
She chose to return to her alma mater based on the strength of its nursing program and the opportunity to stay close to friends and family while she studied.
Today Slomp is two semesters away from graduating. Though she’s not long for campus, you can still catch her in the U of A’s new brand story video. In it, she practices setting up an IV pump on a model of a patient. “That IV pump sound is synonymous with a hospital setting,” she says. And it’s something that nurses need to do surely and efficiently, a task that enables care for patients.
Nursing purists have no doubt noted that all of Slomp’s actions in the video are straight from the textbook. This is no accident, as the nursing program that trained her also sent an instructor to consult on the video shoot and help Slomp nail it.
She’s found that spirit of teamwork and instruction throughout her time in the program.
“I 100 per cent look up to a lot of the nurses I’ve trained with,” she says. “I really appreciate the hands-on experience and I learn a lot in a clinical setting.”
She’ll carry that generous spirit into her career as a nurse.
“I want to work in the cardiac ward,” she says, “on one of the units where I was a patient myself. Being able to give back to other people is a huge thing for me when it comes to nursing.”