Verb to describe nursing student's clinical actions

Nurses General Nursing

Published

Those of you who have students in your hospitals, what verb do you use to describe what they do?

Are they "training" ?

"Working" ?

"Practicing" ?

Given that they don't have licenses and aren't receiving pay and yet are partly responsible for their patients and do carry , I think it's hard to define. I had difficulty understanding the exact parameters of the role throughout the time I was in nursing school, and I want to be able to effectively coach student nurses, so I'd value the group's input.

Anybody have the perfect verb?

"Training" works for me.

They're definitely not "working", as they don't get paid.

And I don't believe they're even "partly" responsible for your patients. That might be a dangerous assumption to make. Maybe you could say their instructor is responsible for any mistakes they make. Maybe.

I believe any involved is for the instructor and the school. Not for the student. I think the worst that can happen to him is getting kicked out of the program.

Specializes in CMSRN.

I always used the term "training" when in clinical. I thought it fit best with what we were doing.

As an editor I like to cut unnecessary words. However, for this query I can't come up with a single word to describe both relationship and action. Therefore:

If you are talking about enrolled students on a clinical rotation being supervised by faculty, they are "doing clinical rotations."

If you are taking about an enrolled student who is doing a preceptorship (unpaid) with a staff RN, that's "doing a preceptorship."

I try to avoid the word "training" because of its old-fashioned connotation of when nurses were largely trained by physicians (even in nursing programs) but were not expected to have any basis for independent judgment, e.g., actual education. "Working" implies a paid relationship with an employer.

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