Question about weird clinical hours

[gc1010]

I'm in fundamentals and health assessment so we are at the SNF and my school wants the students to go to the SNF the day before our clinical days to pick a patient and do a write up. Is this the way you have done it? There won't be an instructor or anything just students.

The thing is that I don't think they are actual school hours so I should be able to do them any time, agree?

The major factor is that the SNF is over an hour away.

#firstworldproblems.

just curious

[Twinmom06, ASN, APN]

we've had to do that for Fundamentals (which was on a med-surg floor) and also for Med-surg this semester...fortunately if our patient was discharged we didn't have to do it again, we just paired up with another student who's pt was still there...

the main focus was doing the patho research, and med research, and you'll find that most elderly people are generally on the same types of meds...so you learn them well!

[Hygiene Queen]

We were expected to come in the day before and do our research.

We had to complete paperwork regarding the pt's demographics, h&p, labs, meds, patho and orders.We had to pull it all together and complete care maps and care plans.

Only in our last rotation were we expected to come in "cold".

If you are instructed to come in the day before, you should do it.

Yes, it takes away from your life, but it's part of learning and it holds value.

Take advantage of the fact that you have a night to prepare.

Also, sometimes your pt may leave or die after all the hard work and lack of sleep you endured the night before. You come in and find this happened and think, "Crap! All that work for nothing!"

But that's not entirely true.

You still learned something from it.

That's a good thing.

[sarahlee23, LPN]

We had to do this for my med-surg and peds clinicals. The only difference was that our clinical instructor went in before we got there and assigned us patients. So we usually didn't run into the problem of having our patient discharged before we had clinical. And our instructor told us what time our patient assignment would be available, so we could go to the hospital then. For my SNF clinicals, we weren't assigned patients until we got there for our first day of clinical, but we had the same patient for a semester and weren't giving meds and everything right away for those clinicals. I liked going in early to get all the information so that it was fresh in my mind when I went into clinical. Especially the meds as I've always had a hard time keeping them straight.