where was allnurses.com when...

allnurses Guide · Dec 4, 2012

Do you feel that the nurses today are trained as well as they were when you had to hit the books and dig the info out?
I'm just interested in everyone's opinion.

From a purely technical point of view I think nurses are probably better trained now because current information is so much easier to access. It takes about a quarter of the time to access information now as it did even 15 years ago. The internet, the web, PCs, laptops, smartphone apps, Kindle and on it goes.

That pattern is really a continuation of a constant evolution though, as I recently discovered when I saw a training video for pediatric nurses produced in the 1940s. As a nurse trained in the 1970s, I laughed because the video depicted the nurse handing out hair ribbons and moving very slooooooowly . . .

You could argue that the time required in unearthing information in the past created a more diligent learner, but my view is that you still have to be just as diligent now, but your task is to sort out what is important in the avalanche of instantly available information, which is just as arduous to me.

There are multiple components to the training of nurses, though. Things like professional behavior, ethics, and the not well-defined term of "nursing culture" seems to have suffered through the years, but perhaps that is part of the changes in the society at large. My :twocents:

TheCommuter, BSN, RN · Dec 6, 2012

From a purely technical point of view I think nurses are probably better trained now because current information is so much easier to access. It takes about a quarter of the time to access information now as it did even 15 years ago. The internet, the web, PCs, laptops, smartphone apps, Kindle and on it goes.

Then again, the three-year diploma grads of yesteryear could hit the ground running with little or no orientation on their first jobs, while the graduates of today often need extensive training to get up to par.

allnurses Guide · Dec 6, 2012

Then again, the three-year diploma grads of yesteryear could hit the ground running with little or no orientation on their first jobs, while the graduates of today often need extensive training to get up to par.

I agree 100%, and I was having trouble conveying what I meant. Since she mentioned "hitting the books to dig the info out" I focused my answer more on that, but there is no doubt that diploma school trained grads had been immersed in the other components I mentioned briefly, which would include the extensive time spent actually working the floor and getting hands-on skills training.

I don't know quite how the burden of clinical training got shifted from the colleges of nursing to the hospitals, but I do know that for the most part, new grads from BSN programs of the 70s and 80s I worked with quickly integrated into the workflow, meaning that likely the clinical hours in college programs have been declining at a steady rate since the demise of the diploma schools.