After months of investigating inefficiencies in Drexel’s medical program, Drexel University has officially implemented an innovative policy designed to provide every nursing student with the opportunity to participate in immersive, first-person surgical research.
The university claims that studying dead bodies is an outdated practice. “Nurses and doctors should prevent dead bodies. You don’t operate on dead people — that doesn’t make any sense,” says the appointed student advisor for the project. “This new hands-on approach has already produced groundbreaking results in experimental trials, and I believe it will be essential to advancing modern medicine.”
At the start of the trial, nursing students will be required to form pairs and complete a minimum of nine procedures per academic year. To ensure safety, each procedure must be overseen by one of the program’s advisors, ensuring the student remains conscious for the majority of the experience.
“In our commitment to student safety, supervision will be provided to ensure that the student patient remains conscious for at least 50 percent of the procedure. We have thoroughly investigated the legitimacy of this approach, and fifty percent has been determined as the optimal balance for both sanity and efficiency. Additionally, a strict selection process ensures that students’ body parts are assigned based on rigorous testing to maximize effectiveness,” says Gerb Jon, Drexel’s Head of Nursing.
Nursing students already contend with full class schedules and clinicals involving exposure to feces, verbal abuse, and unprompted murder confessions. Many say that adding mandatory surgical participation – while remaining conscious – places excessive pressure on them. Drexel, however, maintains that nursing students are well within their means to seek support at Drexel’s Counseling Center, which has recently introduced a new immersion program allowing psychology students to conduct research on those in crisis. The University also notes that this initiative offers lonely and struggling nursing students an opportunity to participate more fully in the Drexel community.
When we interviewed one nursing student, their only response was:
“Hell, each day we descend deeper.”