Latex, scrubs, stethoscopes — the Atlanta-area Piedmont Fayette Hospital isn’t running your average summer camp. It’s nurse camp, and — according to its founder — some high schoolers are taking advantage of it in a big way.
The free camp is celebrating its third year in 2025, in which rising juniors and seniors familiarize themselves with Piedmont’s campus while learning important nursing skills — like infection prevention and how to check blood pressure. It’s a brain child of Piedmont residency coordinator Halea Caudill, R.N., who recently chatted with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about all that’s on offer.
Not your average summer camp
“I did a lot of summer camps not related to health care,” she said, speaking on her experience growing up. “I played a lot of sports, (did) 4-H — those kind of summer camps. But summer camp did have an impact on me as a person growing, building relationships.”
Credit: Piedmont Fayette Hospital
Credit: Piedmont Fayette Hospital
For Piedmont’s camp, the objective is to help teens build professional relationships, but that’s hardly all.
“I do a lot of volunteer work outside of here,” Caudill explained. She’s currently planning a trip with Medical Missions Outreach to provide medical aid to Nepal for her latest mission. “That’s something I’m passionate about, thinking about how, as a hospital, we could support our community and get involved with the kids.”
In late 2022, the nurse’s Piedmont team was discussing how they would rebuild their workforce following the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when inspiration struck.
“How do we start that process of getting people back into the nursing profession and growing the workforce? We decided we would start with our high school age students who are interested in health care, to connect with them, invest in them, help them grow and then hopefully out into the profession to go back and serve our community here in Fayetteville and the surrounding areas.”
So what’s on the menu?
The nurse summer camp isn’t all about networking. There’s much more on the menu.
“You’re going to do all kinds of cool stuff,” Caudill said. “We are going to talk about, of course, safety in the hospital. First and foremost, they learn about how we keep ourselves safe as nurses, because there’s a lot of germs here. A lot of things we don’t want to take home; we don’t want to gift to other people.”
“We learn about the history of nursing,” she added. “We do a presentation for them. Where did nursing come from? How did nursing evolve? When we identify as a nurse, what does that mean? What are we representing from our history? Things like that. So we do a nursing presentation Day 1.”
After all that prep, they’ll be making their way into the hospital.
“They’re going to be around our patients,” Caudill added. “They’re going to shadow with our nursing staff. So the first day is preparing them, getting them ready to be safe and then also giving them skills that they’re going to take back home into their community to educate others because a huge part of nursing is education and educating others. So teaching them that we’re teaching you proper handwashing. Now go teach your family that so that you can help your family stay safe from getting sick during flu season. That’s something we do as a nurse. It’s not ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ that you see on TV all the time.”
Once they are in the hospital, it’ll be time to stay close and listen up. The biggest lesson is yet to come.
“We have nurses volunteer from their unit, and I make a rotation plan and they see different areas,” she said. “They go to our OR, they can go to critical care, they go to the emergency room and they spend three to four hour chunks of time in that department, shadowing a nurse. I tell them you are their duckling. Stay by their hip and soak in all the knowledge you can. Ask them questions, understand what they’re doing, see how you feel about it. Am I overwhelmed in the ED (Emergency Department)? So maybe ED nursing is not for me. But did I think that, you know, a critical ICU was really, really cool? They can start to get that experience.”
The bottom line
The Piedmont Fayette Hospital Summer Nurse Camp is free 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. June 2 through June 4. The deadline to apply is March 21 and participants will be notified of their acceptance by April 1. Applications can be made here.
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