Purdue Curiosity Clinic provides future nurses, audiologists and speech-language pathologists clinical experience with kids

Purdue University Nursing senior Ashley Woltman, left, interacts with children while she demonstrates the length of a human’s small intestine during a recent edition of the Curiosity Clinic inside the Nursing Center for Family Health.(Tim Brouk)

Written by: Tim Brouk, tbrouk@purdue.edu

Ask a first grader what they want to be when they grow up, and you might get teacher, astronaut or police officer.

What does Sarah Kiger’s first grader, Charlie, want to be?

“He tells us he wants to be a chiropractor on a regular basis,” she said with a laugh.

Charlie and seven other health care curious children between grades 1-3 were recent special guests of the Purdue University Curiosity Clinic, a joint program between the School of Nursing and the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (SLHS). A recent session saw the kids interact with seniors in both programs during activities and presentations geared toward health education at the Nursing Center for Family Health in Lyles-Porter Hall. The main goals of the Curiosity Clinic are to give the Purdue students experience interacting with healthy children, something many internships do not provide because they often focus on adult patients or sick children, and to teach the College of Health and Human Sciences students how to adapt health education topics to the pediatric population — sometimes changing those messages on the fly as the kids ask questions. The activities are also designed to make the children more comfortable and knowledgeable with what is going on during their medical check-ups.

“Usually in the doctor’s office, kids might be kind of intimidated, but here they’re like ‘What’s this? Can I do this? Can I do that?’ It’s cool to comfort them,” said Addy Kolb, an SLHS senior. “We sometimes use big, weird-looking equipment so now that they’ve touched it, seen it in action, it’ll definitely calm them down.”

The curious kids were divided into groups of four as they learned about the digestive system, how germs spread, taste buds, how we swallow, and how an eardrum works — with the help of a bowl, plastic wrap, a rubber band, rice and their voices to make the rice vibrate over their handmade “eardrum.”

Overseen by Elizabeth Wertz, director of the Nursing Center for Family Health, and Windi Krok, SLHS clinical professor, this was the third edition of Curiosity Clinic. The Purdue College of Health and Human Sciences (HHS) students created the activities and content for the 90-minute session. The nursing students got clinical hours for their participation and the SLHS undergraduates received a valuable head start before graduate school, when they can start getting their clinical experience.

“This is an opportunity in their senior year to be able to interact and do something really applicable and hands-on, and the interprofessional collaboration is huge,” Krok explained. “If you are in the schools or if you’re in a medical setting and you’re an SLP (speech-language pathologist), you’re going to be working with nurses to some extent, so it’s a great collaboration.”

The local children were brought to the clinic through WonderLand Education, an experiential and nonprofit learning center in West Lafayette. While the most recent session had first-third graders, previous sessions had older kids, grades 4-6. Another session had kindergartners, giving HHS students clinical experience with different age ranges that they will see in the field.

Stethoscopes, otoscopes and audiometers, oh my!

Nursing and SLHS students, who were participating in a service-learning project by participating in the Curiosity Clinic, agreed that simply explaining what certain instruments are and what they do was essential in educating the children and making doctors’ visits less scary. Most kids have seen a stethoscope on cartoons, but other common tools eluded them. For example, an otoscope is something they’ve seen but most didn’t know the name of the instrument that goes in their ear. And they got to see what their doctors’ see.

“That was very popular — getting to see what the inside of an ear looks like,” Wertz said. “Getting to explain it to them really slowed down and individualized is important because a lot of times they are going to a physician’s office or a nurse practitioner’s office (and) they’re being told what’s happening and they may not understand.”

Another activity hammered home the tricky differences between large and small intestines. Using string and stretching down a long hallway, nursing students showed how the small intestines are four times longer than the large intestines, about 20 feet compared to five feet. The intestines were named for their thickness in size as opposed to length.

Many, many questions answered

Throughout the afternoon, the HHS students were peppered with dozens of questions from the eager and energetic children. Some of their queries — and the answers — included:

• “Are you going to x-ray me?” “No.”
• “Can we cut a human up?” “No.”
• “Poop comes out of your mouth?” “Definitely not.”

The HHS students had to keep sharp because there was little warning what some of their young visitors were going to say or do next.

“You’re kind of going along with them. Everything is not like a play by play by play,” said nursing senior Riley Johnson. “We just have a general plan for the activities or teaching and then it goes from there.”

Ashley Woltman, another nursing senior, hopes to work in pediatrics when she starts her career. Her experience in the Curiosity Clinic hammered home that dealing with young patients requires more explanation and diligence.

“With kids it’s like ‘What are you holding?’ Well, let’s take two minutes and explain what I’m holding and what I’m going to do,” Woltman said. “And then they get scared when you come up to them, so you have to take a second and tell them everything.”

Woltman also gained clinical experience working with kids at the Riley Heart Center in Indianapolis. While her small patients were waiting for heart transplants, they were still children.

“I remember having to play with a four-year-old while they waited for a heart. You have both sides with the kids — playing with them and taking care of them at the same time,” Woltman said. “Kids (pediatrics) is where I’d love to be as a nurse. … Just because you can hang out with them and kind of be goofy with them, even if they’re sick.”

Back to the future back specialist

Young Charlie enthusiastically participated in the activities throughout the 90-minute session and seemed to take in all the information. This was his second Curiosity Clinic experience. Could the program be the catalyst that sends the six-year-old on the path toward health care or medicine?

“He loves science, and he loves learning about the different systems of the body,” Kiger said. “When we learned about this hands-on opportunity, he was super excited.

“He brought a stethoscope home and was testing it on all of us. He thought that was super cool.”