By Blake Haas

BLOOMINGTON – Current and prospective students at Illinois Wesleyan University will soon see a change in the classroom thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

IWU School of Nursing and the Department of Biology won a $150,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to help develop courses in Gerontology and Palliative Care come the fall.

“We’re grateful to Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, this grant will allow us to offer Palliative Care instruction both in the form of class in the May term and paid summer internships for interested health care students,” said Victoria Folse, Professor and Director of the School of Nursing and Caroline F. Rupert Chair of Nursing. “The $150,000 grant will allow this program to be implemented across two-years and then we [IWU] will be looking for additional funding to continue it [the programs] further.”

The course which will begin in May of 2019, is aimed to help students learn through hands-on activity in the classroom and in addition will offer paid internships so students can have the skills to be successful in the work force.

“We are going to approach this May term class as a team-taught course,” said Folse. “The students will have opportunities to interact with individuals with expertise in biology, nursing, religion, psychology and by doing that we are going to assure that we can holistically cover the needs of patients and families in their end of life experience.”

One of the major keys to the grant is the fact that students will have a manikin that help students simulate a real life experience as if an actual human patient was laying there in the hospital bed.

“There will be small group activities, certainly some lecture and one of the exciting elements of this grant is that we are going to purchase a geriatric manakin that will allow students to actually simulate an end of life experience as part of the class,” Folse said.

Folse added that another factor of the grant will help biology cultivate relationships that will foster student growth after they graduate.

“Because of the partnership with the School of Nursing and the department of Biology, we’re able to leverage the relationships that the School of Nursing has in the community. Since we already offer internship experiences for our students,” added Folse. “Biology hasn’t had an opportunity to cultivate those relationships and so in partnership we will be expanding the number of facilities and the number of agencies in which students whether they are pre-med or nursing or health care related can provide direct patient care and work with interprofessional teams for this Palliative Care focus.”

Blake Haas can be reached at [email protected].