>>> Sorry - this is a big vent and may be very long!!
Today we took a stand against our clinical instructor (and now I'm a little worried).
Our CI is new to the school and new to the hospital. She was a last minute replacement, but claims she has 10 years teaching experience. We are half way into our rotation.
The earliest she has arrived was 15 minutes late - and that was on the first day. Since then, she insisted that we start clinicals 1 hour early (which put a strain on some of our schedules), and has been at least 30 minutes late every day.
When she does show up, she only has a list of patients on the floor. She does not check with the head nurse about who is getting discharged. She does not check the medication chart about what kinds of meds (and what time) the patient will get. She brings in her list and randomly assigns us a patient... AFTER we have already been waiting up to 45 minutes for her to show up! We usually do not hit the floor for 2-2.5 hours after our clinical started. Sometimes we end up with nothing to do (due to discharges and no meds to pass). She told us to bring our books to study, and to hide in the conference room:banghead:
There are other frustrations - wasting time talking endlessly about herself, her family, every health problem she has ever had, etc, etc...
Although I would not say she is mean to us, she can be condescending to some of the patients (behind their backs), primarily the overweight or mentally impaired.
Our professors that teach the theory part of the class are aware of the problems (heard it from the grapevine, I guess), but can't do anything about it. They have been supportive of us, and have given us some advice.
The official school policy is that a student must wait 10 minutes for an instructor to show up. Our professor said that certainly after 20 minutes we can assume they will be absent.
So.. today, we waited 20 minutes, then as a group, got up and left. We all went home. I really wanted to talk to her first (as a group) and then leave tomorrow if she is late again, but I agreed to go with the majority.
Now I am really worried. This woman will be writing our evaluations. I know she will be angry, and have no idea what will happen tomorrow. I think we have enough documentation to put administration on our side, but this could get really ugly.
Anyone ever had anything like this happen to them???
