Mental Health Clinicals

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What are your mental health clinicals like? What did you actually do there? I'm curious about how other schools do this. We had about 48 hours in acute care (short-term inpatient) and 18 in extended care (people in the community). I feel like it's been mostly observation.

Specializes in Med Surg/Tele/ER.
I loved my psych rotation also! I graduate next month with my ADN and have been looking at psych jobs. Believe it or not, it is hard to get a new grad job in psych! They want at least one year experience. I even have a classmate that has interned at a psych hospital for about 6 months now and they won't even hire her as a new grad! Dissapointing............

Congrats on your graduation! I will graduate in May w/my ADN. I am kinda undecided where to start...my instructor strongly suggests med surg for the experience. After reading your post I guess I was lucky to get the job offer. Are you having a hard time deciding where to start? Another thing because I graduate in May...I have to do an additional 120 clinical hrs before I can take the NCLEX. I don't know if all states are doing that but good ole KY is......all 2006 grads have to go to the new requirements. Good Luck to you! :)

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Specializes in ICU, Research, Corrections.
Congrats on your graduation! I will graduate in May w/my ADN. I am kinda undecided where to start...my instructor strongly suggests med surg for the experience. After reading your post I guess I was lucky to get the job offer. Are you having a hard time deciding where to start? Another thing because I graduate in May...I have to do an additional 120 clinical hrs before I can take the NCLEX. I don't know if all states are doing that but good ole KY is......all 2006 grads have to go to the new requirements. Good Luck to you! :)

Yeah, in Arizona we have to do an extra 108 hours of clinical before the NCLEX. Believe it or not, I start that preceptorship next week and I have no idea where yet or what department!!! The nursing shortage is so bad here the school is having a hard time finding nurses to precept us.

Cheers,

Lu Ann

PS - I already have a job on a transplant unit. Sort of a glorified med/surg :rotfl:

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I did my mental health clinical on the psych unit of a prison. We had 60 hours in the prison and 65 in the community (AA meetings, schizophrenics anonymous meetings, probate court hearings, pretty much anything having to do with mental health). We had constant interactions with the patients and did many assessments on them, including mental status exams, nursing assessments, suicide risk assessment, AIMS assessment. We also had to read articles, develop nursing groups for the patients, do a case presentation on a patient, do weekly logs and reflections, develop a project that benefits those who are mentally ill, and write a very in depth clinical paper. It was definately a lot of work, but interesting.

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Specializes in Med Surg/Tele/ER.
Yeah, in Arizona we have to do an extra 108 hours of clinical before the NCLEX. Believe it or not, I start that preceptorship next week and I have no idea where yet or what department!!! The nursing shortage is so bad here the school is having a hard time finding nurses to precept us.

Cheers,

Lu Ann

PS - I already have a job on a transplant unit. Sort of a glorified med/surg :rotfl:

Good for you on the job!...Right now I am doing 8h clinicals (Med Surg) once a wk. Then in Jan.-May I do two 12's a wk (ICU) then, after I graduate I do 120 more hrs before I can take the NCLEX. Our head of nursing dept. came in today to talk to us & said after we graduate we will work as RNA's for that 120hrs & if we fail the NCLEX we will then be fired. I thought that was awful nice of her to point that out!:rotfl: I had not planned on telling anyone on when I was taking the NCLEX so if GOD forbid I failed...I could just kinda disappear :imbar. Looks like that plan is shot.

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Specializes in med surg, tele, ortho, preop, recovery.

I'm in mental health right now and tomorrow is my last clinical at a behavorial hospital. Did anyone have to do process recording? We have to write down an entire conversation with a patient and I'm finding that hard to do since we have to recall the entire conversation by memory.

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I did two process recordings. What I basicall did was limit what I recorded to the most important and productive parts of the conversation. My conversations with patients were at least 15 minutes long, so to have written down everything said (if by some miracle I remembered it all) would have made for an extremely lengthy document. And if you have to also include the purpose of each interaction, thoughts/feelings, interpretation/theory, intervention and rationale, and evaluation, it would take forever to type it all up.

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OMG! I LOVED my psych roatation. I am only in a LPN program at the moment and we were relegated to the Gero Psych, but still...we ran the gamut of all diagnosis. People don't just stop having delusions because they turn 63. I am looking into working as a Health Care Tech there during school in a more acute ward for experience to make sure that I really want to do this. All the nurses at the hospital kept telling me to go med/surge that this was an end of the career type of position, but even with that..I think I really like this field and wouldn't mind going through with becoming a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner eventually. I think part of my enthusiasm comes from our Nursing Instructor who was a Pysch nurse for most of her career. YOU ROCK! Ms. PARTINGTON (sorry I used a persons name but she really did make Psych nursing come alive)

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Specializes in Ortho/Neuro.

At our school we had to do our clinical rotation at an outpatient day program. It was terrible! We have a very small amount of mental health facilities in our area, so the pickins are slim! For the people at the day program it is just normal for them. They didn't want to talk about their mental illness, they wanted to talk about what movie they saw, or what they're working on in the cereamics room. It was extremely irritation to be at that place. The staff there was a joke. There was one LPN on duty and we barely interacted with her. Most of the staff wasn't even educated (or qualified IMO) to interact with the mentally ill. Their "groups" were a joke. One group that sticks out was on weight management. They showed a video about gastric bypass surgery! This isn't even an option for these people. They can't even afford their own homes and food, let alone a costly elective surgery! It was a joke and I am very disapointed about my mental health clinical rotation!:angryfire

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Specializes in CV Surgery Step-down.

I absolutely loved my psych rotation at the state prison for women. It was so interesting. I really learned a lot.

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