MANCHESTER, N.H. – By the end of the week, Heidy Rodriguez will know how to check a patient’s blood pressure, temperature and pulse. She’ll know her way around the operating room, intensive care unit and maternity ward. She’ll learn how to calm infants and comfort the elderly.

Then she’ll go back to junior high.

Rodriguez, 13, is spending a rigorous two weeks at a day camp designed to expose preteens and young teen-agers to the nursing profession.

“I never thought you could make a bed with someone in it!” she said, marveling at the skills she’s learned in just a few days. “It’s really exciting. I thought nurses just gave shots, but it’s so much more. Nurses do everything.”

Though specialized summer camps are nothing new, they usually target older teens. But the nursing camp’s creators at St. Anselm College wanted to help young students focus on their futures before they reach high school.

“We think we’re doing kids a favor by telling them, ‘the world is your oyster,’ but what we hear is they’re overwhelmed by choices,” said Sylvia Durette, a faculty member at the college and the camp’s director. “We want them to know more about themselves, and we want them to know more about nursing.”

Durette said she knows of only one or two nursing camps in other states that involve such young children, but they last only a week and aren’t as intense, she said.

At this camp, bandaging and bed-making replace arts and crafts. There are no campfires or singalongs, but plenty to keep the campers – 27 girls and one boy – busy.

The camp features classroom instruction at the college campus plus trips to area medical facilities where campers practice their skills. Though one long-term goal is to ease the state’s nursing shortage, short-term benefits abound – the campers are learning empathy and communication skills, and they’re having fun.

Dressed in blue scrubs with stethoscopes slung around their necks, one group of girls spent a morning making beds at Hanover Hills Nursing Home and helping residents with their lunches.

“Gross,” one girl says when Heidy returns from a room where a patient recently died. But Heidy is calm, mature. She points to the signs outside each room that have pictures of each resident.

“I wanted to see who it was, but they were already taking her picture down,” she said.

Bridget Lynch, a St. Anselm senior, licensed practical nurse, and camp counselor, said she hopes even campers who decide nursing isn’t for them will leave with a new respect for themselves and others.

“These girls didn’t know how much heart and love they have in them,” Lynch said.

“More than anything, they need this hands-on time. It builds their self-esteem and confidence.”

Campers pay nothing for the two-week session, thanks to the Manchester School to Career Partnership, which got a state grant to connect kids to careers in health care.

“Everyone is talking about the nursing shortage, but concrete projects were far and few between,” said Clint Jones, business liaison for the partnership.

According to one recent study, New Hampshire is producing only half the nursing graduates it needs to deal with the shortage. The number of registered nurses in New Hampshire is expected to increase by 5.5 percent by 2006, half of the projected 11 percent national increase.

Nursing homes have a particularly tough time recruiting nurses and aides. The American Health Care Association estimates that more than 123,000 nursing positions are vacant at long-term care facilities across the country.

Though it will be years before any of the campers enter the work force, Hanover Hill’s president, Ted Lee, said they would be worth waiting for. The home, which has started to recruit nurses and aides overseas, relished the opportunity to show the campers a variety of career opportunities, he said.

“It was a wonderful opportunity to get kids in here at an early age,” he said. “They can see there’s a future in it.”

Many campers had never been in a nursing home before. But they soon overcame their shyness.

“Old people are so cool,” said 14-year-old Katie Silveria of Loudon, who quickly corrected herself, substituting “elderly” for “old.”

Though some of her friends teased her about attending the camp, Katie said she thoroughly enjoyed herself.

“I used to think it was doctors doing everything,” she said. “Now I know the nurses do everything.”