Nursing

Hello, I am Lecturer Özge Öner. I work as the Head of Nursing Department at Sakarya University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences. As a university, we have skill laboratories where our students become more qualified, more self-educated, comfortable, free and open to learning. In addition, the subject of communication has a special importance for our department and our university. For this reason, we provide practical communication lessons to our students in our communication laboratories that we have established. There may be great difficulties in communication. In particular, we witness many communication problems in the communication between the patient, the relatives of the patient or the healthcare personnel. Nurses have very important roles in maintaining this process in a healthy way. For this reason, we want our students to become individuals that have certain competencies in communication when they graduate from our department. We observe that theoretical knowledge is not sufficient enough to teach students how to deal with patients which are facing a challenging situation, such as communicating with oncology patients who are terminally ill, and their relatives who may be angry. For this reason, our students will see their reactions in the communication laboratory by watching live practices through drama studies, group psychotherapies, role-playing, live cases where we adopt the experience-based learning method, and get to know themselves and then get to know the patient and communicate with the patient. Thus, they will learn that they need to control their emotions when dealing with patients before they graduate from this university. In our department, there are courses such as Anatomy, Physiology, Histology, Pharmacology, which are basic medical sciences, as well as an introduction to nursing course, which explains the philosophy of nursing to students and the conceptual framework of nursing. In the following periods, they will learn internal medicine nursing, surgical nursing, pediatrics and nursing, gynecology and diseases nursing as a part of the Nursing Care and Management course; In the senior year, they will take field courses such as Mental Health and Nursing, Public Health and Nursing. However, we have departmental elective courses and field specialization courses, starting to be provided in the second grade. Students can choose courses according to their interests and work in the fields they want so they can work there after they graduate.
With our professional skills laboratories, our students will feel more comfortable, safer and free to make mistakes with the virtual hospital environment we have created here in our laboratories before bringing our students together with real patients in the hospital environment. We offer an environment where they can return to examine their mistakes later, and examine and correct their mistakes together with our instructors. In other words, our students have will complete their practical training in a virtual environment in our laboratories before undertaking clinical practice. In addition, we have equiped our laboratories with two giant screens. Videos we shot are projected on these screens constantly to prepare the students before they engage in the laboratory application. For example, we complete our pre-laboratory preparations by watching videos about blood collection, patient introduction, and blood pressure controls. In our department, thanks to the Erasmus, Farabi and Mevlana programs, students can immerse themselves in different cultures, improve themselves, travel and study at the same time. We organize national panels and symposiums with our external stakeholders, especially on important days concerning health, as a part of our institutional cooperation agenda. We are making an effort to conduct international congresses. In addition, we offer many certificate programs in the field of nursing and health in cooperation with our university's Lifelong Education Application and Research Center (SAYEM). Job opportunities for nursing undergraduate graduates are quite vast in Turkey and around the world. A 3-step health service is provided in our country. After our students graduate, they can work in preventive health services, FHCs (Family Health Center), tuberculosis dispensaries, community mental health centers. In addition, after graduation, they can work in research hospitals, state hospitals, private hospitals, and all institutions and organizations that provide treatment services. Students can work in rehabilitation centers, which is a tertiary health service. In addition, they can work in prisons, home care services, as school nurses in schools, and in the field of occupational health and safety in factories. Graduates can also pursue master's and doctoral degrees. They can carry on with their education or work as an academician nurse, while working in hospitals or in all other fields we have listed. Therefore, a wide range of job opportunities await our students who graduate from our nursing department. When we examine the factors that students take into consideration when choosing this profession, the first thing is the ease of finding a job immediately after graduation. But the most important and best advice I can give to students is that the more passionately you are involved in a profession, the more you feel like you belong there, the more successful and happy individuals you will be. This profession is not a profession that can be done without passion, just choosing it for the financial benefits. As Sakarya University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Nursing, we look forward to welcoming students considering our department. We wish you success in your exams. Hope to meet you soon, goodbye.