These guidelines stress that any student participation in direct patient care should be voluntary, a requirement that ought to apply to senior nursing students as well. It would be unethical to coerce students into volunteering in such stressed circumstances.

The idea that these students are “volunteering” creates another question. Should they be paid, since they are working as front-line staff? Should they receive academic credit for their work, since they are students? Or should they, as the Association of American Medical Colleges argues, receive no compensation of either sort, making their volunteerism as uncoerced as possible? There are pros and cons to each of these approaches, and each state can make its own decision based on what it considers the most correct response to the question of compensation.

Finally, there needs to be a strict requirement that nursing and medical students do not take care of Covid-19 patients and do not work in intensive-care units or step-down units. Students should staff lower-risk floors with comparatively less-complex cases: acute pancreatitis, simple fractures, a flare-up of atrial fibrillation. Having students on those floors would allow licensed nurses and doctors to work in areas of greater complexity and need.

Despite their lack of degrees, there is a lot these students could do. SN-C’s could administer medications, change dressings, monitor patients, serve as gophers and keep patients’ records up-to-date. MT-C’s could work on already established teams in the hospital and enter orders into the electronic medical record, make needed phone calls, communicate with nurses on basic care issues and provide assessments of patients having clinical issues with a directive to call in a superior if they feel out of their depth.

Because these students would be temporarily licensed personnel, appropriate legal standards would be needed to safeguard them from litigation. Some expansion of a good Samaritan law would probably work. The students are not “civilians,” but nor are they doctors and nurses. If they do their best and do not attempt to do work they are not qualified to do, mistakes should not be legally held against them.

“Diseases desperate grown, by desperate appliance are relieved, or not at all,” Shakespeare writes in “Hamlet.” What hospitals in New York are already experiencing could be a nationwide crisis within weeks. We need to get creative now to respond later. Having taught nursing students and worked with medical students, I know that many will choose to heed the call and step up.

Theresa Brown is a clinical faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing and the author of “The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives.”

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