LOUISVILLE, Ky. — There is a new educator at Bellarmine University who has four legs and is also known as the Mayor or Knight of Lansing.
Vince is the official Bellarmine facility dog for the nursing program, and his job is to help equip students to work with facility dogs in the health care industry, according to Family Nurse Practitioner professor and Vince’s handler, Leslie Leffler.
“Many of our clinical partners have facility dogs that help their patients. And so he’s helping us train our students to interact with them when they become nurses. We also use them in certain pediatric simulations for nursing students so that they can see what it’s like to get the facility dog to come and interact with their patient, help relieve their pain, go through a procedure,” explained Leffler.
Leffler says Bellarmine’s nursing program is the first in the state of Kentucky and the second in the nation to have a facility dog implemented in an educational setting.
“Health care is ever-changing. And so it’s very important that we stay on the cutting edge of what our clinical partners are doing out in the community,” said Leffler.
Vince is half golden retriever, half Labrador retriever. He was trained through Paws with Purpose and their training program with the women at the Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women.
Elaine Weisberg, with Paws with Purpose, says they have trained over 15 facility dogs that are working in the medical community here in Louisville.
“You’ve got a dog that’s well behaved and is there listening to the cues and doing different things. The nursing students here now will get to see how they can incorporate them into their therapy,” said Weisberg.
Weisberg says all their dogs learn the same thing.
“They learn over 25 different cues. It’s all positive training and we don’t know if they’re going to be facility dogs or assistance dogs,” said Weisberg.
Leffler believes facility dogs are held to a higher standard because Vince must be versatile in many environments.
She says she would have loved to learn alongside a facility dog when she was in college.
“So never would I have dreamed, even a year ago or two years ago, that I would be a family nurse practitioner that’s a professor at a university that now is handling a very highly skilled, very highly trained facility dog for the university. It’s something I did not get to experience in nursing school,” said Leffler.
Leffler hopes to see facility dogs across the university. Vince started his new position this summer and officially graduated from his “in-training” status to a fully trained facility dog last week.