No Such Title as a Graduate Nurse in Indiana

I am not too far off in left field with this blog.

The President of the Indiana Board of Nursing, Carolyn Slagle in her President's Message appearing in the March 2008 edition of the Indiana Board of Nursing newsletter, Nursing Focus, discusses the history of the graduate nurse and nurse extern in Indiana. See page 4 at http://www.in.gov/pla/files/March2008.pdf.

This title no longer exists and I posted about this here in 2007. I had a nursing student client who worked at a hospital in Indiana as a graduate nurse. Imagine that? When I graduated from nursing school in 1993 with my ASN, I worked as a graduate nurse at Decatur County Memorial Hospital in Decatur, Indiana.

As discussed in the President's Address, there is no longer a need for a graduate nurse or nurse extern role in the licensing scheme with the computerized NCLEX testing. Licenses are issued in a matter of weeks as opposed to months when I took the written exam. I believe we were the last class to take the written and paper exam. I guess I am dating myself now.

See my initial post at http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/441771/22570314