Julie Vignato, a former nurse manager at the Naval Hospital, Camp Pendleton has been hired as a full-time faculty member in the nursing department at MiraCosta College.
Vignato said she hopes to recruit more Marines and help them succeed in the community college's licensed vocational nursing program.
Vignato arrived at Camp Pendleton in 2003 and supervised 40 nurses and corpsmen at the base hospital until she was discharged in December. In addition to her regular hospital duties, she served as command liaison with nursing students from MiraCosta's LVN program.
In her new position, Vignato will be one of five instructors in the program.
“One of my missions in the Navy Nurse Corps was to teach and develop medical corpsmen,” she said. “It seemed natural. I found that students energized me and that I loved teaching.”
MiraCosta's LVN program was founded in January 1965, and it is accredited by the California Board of Vocational Nurse and Psychiatric Technicians.
Vignato said that in California, LVNs typically work in skilled nursing facilities and outpatient clinics where they provide basic nursing care under the direction of physicians and registered nurses.
Although MiraCosta enjoys a 92 percent pass rate on the state board exam, military corpsmen who want to transition to being LVNs in civilian life don't fare as well as other students on the test.
“The mission of our corpsmen is to be on the front lines and deploy,” Vignato said. “They have a wealth of knowledge and unique experience as well as great technical skills. Extra education would help them with critical-thinking skills.”
During the fall semester, Vignato and Marti Essman, nursing department chairwoman, will solicit feedback from corpsmen enrolled in the LVN program and research the possibility of offering a transition course that would increase their chances of passing the exam.
“The course would be like a bridge,” Essman said. “Instead of starting from the beginning, we would bring them up to speed. They would get credit for their experience.”
A decision to offer the course will be made by December. Essman said she is receiving an increasing number of inquiries about the LVN program from corpsmen.
Vignato's military career began at the University of Rochester, where she graduated cum laude with a bachelor of science degree in nursing on an ROTC scholarship in 1996. As an active-duty military nurse for almost 10 years, she served in eight specialties in naval hospitals in Portsmouth, Va., Roosevelt Rhodes Naval Base in Puerto Rico and Naples, Italy, before arriving at Camp Pendleton.
“I worked from the cradle to the grave and took great pride in serving soldiers as well as their wives and children,” Vignato said.
Vignato is working on a master's degree in nursing education from St. Joseph's College of Maine.
She is a lieutenant commander in the Inactive Ready Reserves of the U.S. Navy.
For more information about MiraCosta's LVN program, call the health occupations information line at (760) 795-6842 (source)
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