Palpations, physical exams on genitals?

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In our health assessment course there is a few chapters on doing health assessments, palpating, exams etc on both male and female genitals. Is this done on eachother (students) or on manicans? As a young female nursing student I surely don't want the guys in my class to be doing that on me during labs, I'm very self concious and heavily involved in my religious beliefs and do not want the students in my class to be doing that on me. How was yours done? any sigh of relief plz

At my age, I have no modesty left (well, not much, anyway), but I was a tad nervous about going in on my first round of clinicals to do the physical assessments. I was looking for advice and the best I found was from a nun who trained other RNs who said of the male parts, "grab it like you own it." Which I took to mean as if you were used to handling it. But it made me laugh, made my own nerves subside a bit, and when you get in that room and you have a patient whose dignity is in shreds around him, you will not care a bit to anything other than the best you can for him while protecting what is left of his ego.

Specializes in L&D, infusion, urology.

We haven't done anything like that in our classes. The only genitals I've had any contact with have been in clinicals, or on mannequins. We've seen videos as well. But no, I've never seen any of my classmates' genitals, and vice versa. The girls wore sports bras or tank tops under our scrubs for heart and lung sounds. That's about as physically intimate as we've been.

Specializes in OR.

When we did our physical assessment checkoffs, we had a breast model we used to demonstrate our breast exam technique. For the male/female genitalia assessment, we were expected to be able to describe in detail how we would assess those parts of the patient.

I'm in my 4th semester of clinicals and have never practiced genital exams on any classmate for any reason. I have done catheters, took out stitches in the peri-area, and have even done enemas in clinicals, but have never once gone "below the belt" on another student of any gender in labaratory. For our HA class we had to bring in a volunteer to show the instructor we could perform a thorough physical exam, but even then we did not even have to do any genital/rectal examination procedures. Those were saved for real-world clinical practice and when we tested off in lab, it was on mannequins and through verbal explanation. And for some out of this world reason that you ABSOLUTELY HAD TO (which is very, very slim), you would almost certainly be paired up with the same gender. As far as the breast exams go, our school had fake breasts that had lumps, masses, etc built into them so each student could get an understanding of what they felt like; even the female students wore these. As a matter of fact, I had to wear them (and i'm a male) and walk around the room and let my 9 other classmates "feel me up" so everyone got a chance to examine them for themselves.

Specializes in Emergency Department.

I'm going into 4th Semester and to date, there really hasn't been any need to do those exams on classmates. There just hasn't. There's enough patient and mannequin experience that we don't have to resort to using fellow classmates as exam models.

For my class we had to allow a full, stark naked genital exam, and had to do it in the student union building during campus tours and freshman orientation so that we could draw other students into the nursing program ;)

The closest a guy may get to actually make you uncomfortable is auscultation of the heart and palpation of the abdomen. It's sometimes hard to correctly auscultate a heart without brushing against a breast or something but in all honesty we are professionals and it shouldn't matter. If you are that uncomfortable ask for a female student.

We never touched genitals

In my physical assessment class we just went over the chapters and had a test on it. No touching each other or any weird stuff...

Specializes in Med Surg.
In our health assessment course there is a few chapters on doing health assessments, palpating, exams etc on both male and female genitals. Is this done on eachother (students) or on manicans? As a young female nursing student I surely don't want the guys in my class to be doing that on me during labs, I'm very self concious and heavily involved in my religious beliefs and do not want the students in my class to be doing that on me. How was yours done? any sigh of relief plz

As one of the few males in my program, I hated the lab days where the female students all had to straight cath me.

I would expect that it would be unethical for a nursing school to subject it's students to something like that... at the very least, a lawsuit waiting to happen. I didn't know the mannequins are so high-tech though... That's really neat!

I think ArtClassRN might...just might... be joking. :)

Specializes in Neuro, Telemetry.
For my class we had to allow a full, stark naked genital exam, and had to do it in the student union building during campus tours and freshman orientation so that we could draw other students into the nursing program ;)

Gizmo as your avatar is just the icing on the cake for this comment. Bahahahahaha

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