Elgin Community College nursing program preps students for success

Ever since she was a young girl, Karen Werrbach had a dream to become a nurse.

“I knew I’ve always wanted to care for people, and nursing is a wonderful profession,” said Werrbach, currently the director of the Women’s Health Institute at Rush-Copley Medical Center in Aurora.

As a Larkin High School alumnus and current Elgin Township resident, Werrbach wanted to begin her nursing studies at a place close to home. That place for her was Elgin Community College.

Werrbach is one of 3,393 graduates who have received a nursing associate degree from Elgin Community College since 1967. She also was one of several people on Aug. 28 who attended the college’s 50th anniversary celebration of its nursing program.

Although the nursing program launched in 1965, nursing education at the college actually started in 1949, said Katherine Sawyer, the college’s executive director of institutional advancement and the ECC Foundation. In 1949, there were 33 nurses at the then-Sherman Hospital in Elgin who enrolled at the college to take general classes, such as biology and anatomy, Sawyer said.

The first graduating class from the two-year nursing program had less than 20 students in 1967, and the cost of tuition at the time was $6 a credit hour, said Wendy Miller, the college’s dean of health professions.

The college’s current cost a credit hour for in-district students is $119 – not including books and fees – but in recent years the school has had much more to offer students. In 2012, the college’s Nursing Education Wing and Simulation Center opened.

The center is state-of-the-art and part of a larger $48 million building project on campus that includes space for 14 other health profession programs and a biology area, Miller said.

The simulation center looks to the future but also honors the past. The central nursing station in the center is named after Dr. Richard Powers and his family, Sawyer said. Powers was a cardiothoracic surgeon at Sherman Hospital, a local advocate for nursing education and instrumental in helping the college launch its nursing program, she said.

Instructors use the simulation center to place students into scenarios as if they were working with live patients. The activities also are filmed so students can review what interventions they used and whether the steps they took were the right ones, Miller said.

The simulation center addresses everything from drawing blood to a cardiac arrest event, she said.

Third-semester student Matt Miller wants to be a cardiac nurse in a hospital after he graduates. In addition to the technology, the St. Charles resident said he likes the guidance he gets from his nursing program instructors.

“They go above and beyond to help you with whatever you are doing,” Matt Miller said.

Jennifer Lindquist taught Werrbach at the school in the early 1980s, and also was an instructor 20 years later to one of Werrbach’s daughters, Corey Laster of Elburn.

Laster is a staff nurse at an outpatient infusion clinic at Delnor Hospital in Geneva. She said her mother, Werrbach, inspired her to go to nursing school.

“My mom, she’d be my study buddy all the time,” said Laster, a St. Charles High School alumnus. “And what she did for me is what I do now for my sister, Katelynn [studying at Chamberlain College of Nursing in Chicago].”

Laster said she hopes her own daughter grows up to see the love her family has for nursing.

Elgin Community College will be ready for another generation of women from Werrbach’s family and more. The program has maintained its national accreditation since 1969 from the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing, according to the college’s website.

Nursing program officials also are completely revamping the curriculum for fall 2016 to offer a concept-based model that currently is popular in the world of nursing education, Wendy Miller said.

“This has taken us three years, so we’re very excited to be going down this new path for nursing students,” Wendy Miller said. “It will prepare us better for the role that nurses play in the future.”

On the Web

To view of video of student Matt Miller describing his Elgin Community College nursing program experience, visit KCChronicle.com.

For information about the nursing program at Elgin Community College, visit www.elgin.edu/students.aspx?id=1498.