Do you work night clinicals?

[HeartsOpenWide]

We are doing Peds/Ob this semester and we have clinical until midnight. I know there are noc shifts when you become a nurse, but is this typical for student rotations? I am having a hard time adjusting; we are at the hospital until 0000 on Tuesdays and then back at the hospital at 0600 Thursdays, its going to be hard for me to go back and forth at first.

[APBT mom, LPN, RN]

The school I'm in our clinicals are 4:30-10pm. I do know of one school that has 7pm-7am clinicals and from what I heard they hate it because they have check offs that need to be done and a bunch of sleeping patients to do them on. I love my clinical hours but I've always been a night person.

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

are you having a problem with keeping awake and alert until midnight on tuesdays or with getting up and getting to clinicals by 6am on thursdays? i've worked all different shifts like this over the years. i would try to get a nap in before going to clinicals on tuesday to get through the shift. if not, i'd pop a nodoz around 8 or 9pm to give me enough of a boost to keep going until midnight (i don't like coffee and won't drink it so i will occasionally substitute with nodoz). i would make sure that i used an alarm clock and got up early on wednesday morning after 6 hours of sleep. don't oversleep on wednesday, so that on wednesday night i was good and tired and would have to go to bed early (8 or 9pm?) in order to get up at 4 am or so, get ready and be in clinical by 6am. i also used to try to set up an attitude in my mind that if i was living on a space ship it would always be dark out and i wouldn't be able to tell what time of day it was anyway, so all that mattered was getting enough hours of sleep in where ever it fit into my schedule.

my mother worked the night shift for years. in order to sleep during the day, she covered the windows of her bedroom with aluminum foil which made the room pitch black. when she closed the door, she put an old towel up against the lower crack so no light came through. you couldn't see your hand held up in front of your face when you were in that room. i slept there once during the day and woke up disoriented because i had no idea what time of day it was even though i could see the alarm clock--couldn't figure out if it was am or pm.

[traumaRUs, MSN, APRN]

Much depends on the number of nursing schools in your area and the availability of clinical sites. In my area, the "big" hospital is the preferred place for clinicals and yes, they do clinicals on both first and second shift. Kinda hard but sometimes on second shift you see things you might not see on the first shift.

Some things that come readily to mind:

1. How does the nurse handle not being able to readily reach a physician?

2. Prioritization becomes paramount as some testing might not be available 24/7.

3. More visitors and how to deal with these issues.

4. Sundowning patients - lol.

[richardjboro1]

hmm ... I've never even thought of having clinicals at night. I guess it would be good to experience the other shifts to see how they handle things differently. Our school only does 0700-12 1/2 shifts twice a week, but we're going to 8hr once a week next semester. Interesting to read what other schools do.

Richard