Updated
Aug 31, 2007 at 05:38 PM by MN_NursingStudent
I'm a 2nd year AD student, and for our clinicals, our instructor requires us to have our patients (2 or sometimes 3) MARs memorized, in addition to memorization of the patients' pertinent medical history and lab values. For each drug the patient is on (doesn't matter if we'll be giving it or not) we need to be able to recite to her the morning of clinical: Drug name, class, what it does, why is the patient receiving the drug, and all major side effects. This could potentially mean dozens of drugs to memorize. We also have to know all our patient's lab values (esp. pertinent ones), if the value is high/low/normal, and what that means for that patient and their disease process. All of this information must be recited to the instructor without looking at any of our papers, and after obtaining the patient information the previous evening. Granted, the patient will hopefully be on at least a few drugs I am familiar with, and explaining their history shouldn't be too bad. Labs are another story, but I'm going to start memorizing normal values for the major tests.
This is in additional to care plans with 2 nursing diagnoses for each patient, which we have to also verbally summarize to our instructor.
I am going crazy about this, not only because of the work required the night before clinical, but because the instructor I have has a reputation for being incredibly tough and making students cry by severely reprimanding them in front of their patients.
Is anyone else here required to do similar things to prepare for clinical? Am I thinking this is harder than it sounds? This is so much more extreme than my clinical demands were last year, I'm having a hard time keeping a positive attitude while thinking about the demands and behavior of my instructor.
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