With the help of 360 Clinic, an O.C.-based health care provider, nursing students at Concordia University in Irvine have transformed the COVID-19 pandemic into a real-life learning lab.

Facing never-before-seen circumstances, some nursing students at Concordia have opted to join the COVID-19 frontlines – eager to bring much needed reinforcements to their exhausted, certified peers in any way possible.   

Still, they are students, nonetheless.

Through a unique partnership with 360 Clinic, the company selected to manage multiple COVID-19 testing sites in the county, Concordia University students are now working the COVID-19 frontlines – working to help test, diagnose and in-take potentially symptomatic COVID-19 patients at testing sites across Orange County. 

Dina Neeman, an instructor at Concordia University, Doctorate of Nursing, Registered Nurse, Public Health Nurse, and Chair of the Orange County Long Beach Nursing Consortium, said in order to protect student nurses, both legally and physically, during the pandemic, student nurses are unable to work on their clinical hours inside hospitals – due to COVID-19. 

This is a problem Neeman said is currently impacting all levels of nursing. Mainly, she added that the closure of clinical sites for students to work off their clinical hours has become a bottleneck, as students wait for clinical sites to reopen. 

“Hospitals are just starting to open up, and slowly try and bring back some students. Most of Orange County and Long Beach nursing students are not graduating on time, because they’re not being able to get their clinical hours in, which is a requirement,” she said. “360 Clinic has been amazing, because with them coming up, we’ve been able to utilize those for clinical hours.”

Vince Tien, 360 Clinic Chief Operating Officer and co-founder, said while these students are bringing help to the frontlines, they are simultaneously shaping what could become the future of health care.

“Here, we not only have clinicians on site, but we also have clinicians that will call and follow up with you if you test positive – that’s where the future of medicine is going. You don’t have to go to a traditional doctor’s office, wait like an hour or so to sit down and meet the doctor for five minutes,” he explained. “Here, it’s going to be scheduled tele-health calls, via phone and Zoom, and they get the convenience of a doctor’s visit on their own schedule.”

Tien added that this illustrates the concept behind 360 Clinic, and the potential it has to bring new methods of care into the community. 

“360 Clinic was really born out of the pandemic and the need for the community to get testing. Previously, we were visiting patients at their home, so we faced lots of lock down, quarantine and isolation. A lot of the nurses couldn’t come to a patient’s home,” he said. 

Considering the impact the virus has had on the health care industry as a whole, Concordia and the 360 Clinic are providing real world experiences to nursing students in Irvine, at a time when the medical industry has never been more impacted. 

Irvine resident Andrew Komoto, a student in Concordia’s nursing program, who also earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Irvine, said given the unprecedented circumstances the COVID-19 pandemic implemented, in terms of restrictions, his options as a student – and a nurse – have been extremely limited.

“I earned my bachelor’s degree at UCI. I studied cognitive psychology and business management, so it was a little bit of a jump, moving to the health field,” he said. “I wanted to do something a little bit more rewarding, a little bit bigger than myself, and to apply those skills of nursing to my family.”

Komoto has enlisted himself on the front lines, working to help test potentially positive COVID-19 patients. However, in the early days of the pandemic, he was struggling to find a way to help his community. 

“In the start of March, everything shut down, all of our clinicals were stopped, and there was pretty much a temporary delay in our education,” Komoto said in an interview with Irvine Weekly. “We [nursing students] understood the challenges facing the hospitals with the lack of PPE, and just the uncertainty of the epidemiology of the virus. Unfortunately, for the safety of the students, we were not allowed to be in the hospitals – and that was hard.”

Despite this setback in his education, Komoto remained optimistic. In his downtime, Komoto said he began volunteering at the Costa Mesa Soup Kitchen, but decided to remain flexible as the circumstances were out of his control. 

“I spent a lot of time at the Costa Mesa Soup Kitchen, even though that wasn’t exactly the sort of help I wanted to provide for the community as a nurse,” he said. 

Between March and September, Komoto and his classmates at Concordia found themselves unable to serve the community as nurses, but eventually, with the help of 360 Clinic, may have ended up acquiring what could become the most extensive real-world training to date. 

“I think we’re all very eager to get us much experience as we can to help prepare us for the next level, and I think that’s where the 360 Clinic really comes in,” he explained. “In short, we didn’t have any experience at all, other than just reading information and learning about it in class – it’s a lot different, when you’re going out into the community and taking precautions – and now you’re working with hundreds of patients a day, that could be potentially positive. So I think you really have to have that mindset of patient safety.” 

As Orange County begins to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine to tiered groups across the county, Concordia University and 360 Clinic are currently working to get Irvine nursing students working at Super PODs throughout the county.  

“To have an extra pair of hands in there, right now – these nurses are working in seven day shifts, 12, 14, 16 hours a day – they need help,” Neeman said. “We’re working with the Orange County Health Agency to get students out there and get them to Disneyland and Soka – and students want to be out there and helping. That’s the first thing they want – not many are afraid of the coronavirus.”

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