Keeping students engaged during clinical

[emarierau]

Next week I start teaching my 3rd clinical group. These are 1st semester ADN students at a community college. They have all completed the PN program and have taken boards to become LPNs and many work as LPNs. The clinical consists of 4-10 hour days (2 days week 1 and then 2 days week 2) on a 30 bed med/surg floor. I'm trying to come up with activities to keep the students engaged during clinical. The first week is a easy as they have a long extensive care plan they must work on (turned in beginning of day 3), patient care, and computer charting. Days 3 and 4 are harder to keep them motivated as they don't have any required paperwork to complete. I already plan on having them take 2 patients (if there are enough to go around!). Nothing bothers me more than students just standing around but I understand that given the floor we are on/hospital we are in that there isn't always something to fill every second of the day. What kind of activities do you all use during clinical to keep students engaged and learning?

[2nurse2teach]

This is the question of the day! I teach OB, so we periods of downtime depending on the census of the day, and I also really dislike seeing students standing around (as do the nurses and staff!). LPNs are always tough, because they have such a varied range of experience and tend to need more challenges to keep them learning and growing. A few ideas I've been trying in our downtime:

- SBAR practice: I give one student a brief scenario requiring a call to a provider and ask them to prepare an SBAR report. I then have them report off to the on-call MD, NP, or nurse specialist (another student who is not familiar with the scenario) to see how they do.

- I ask a student to share an interesting patient (or have one or a few of them look up information from a chart). The student will then give the group a handoff report on the patient (sharing facts from the patient case) and we go around asking each student to formulate a priority problem/etiology/supporting data; we then discuss and choose one priority as a group and the go around again formulating a plan of care for that problem

- If you have access to Up-to-Date or even the internet, you can have the students look up interesting diagnoses, current practice recommendations, or meds in their free time.

- If I have students without a patient, I assign them the role of "resource nurse" and ask them to assist others as needed. During that time I expect them to identify a learning need for the group (i.e. proper injection technique) and prepare an "inservice" for the others to present at a pre- or post-conference.

- I make it clear to all students that we are never above stocking supplies, refilling pitchers, gathering trays, etc. I do encourage them to complete a quick general assessment (no need to touch the patient) in each patient's room and to be sure to ask the patient if he/she needs anything. It seems to be a great way to pick up some extra skills opportunities, plus we are proving ourselves to be a help to the floor :).

Good luck to you! I hope it goes well.

[vintagemother, BSN, CNA, LVN, RN]

Keeping them engaged? Give them paperwork and assign them pts to care for. That will keep them busy, I think. The only way it won't is if they don't actually do pt care. I was very consumed with work during clinicals with this type of expectation.

Of course, some students are experts at dodging work--I'm not sure how they do this though! [emoji23]

Provided the nurse and your school policies and hospital policies actually allow them to do pt care, they should be plenty busy!

[vintagemother, BSN, CNA, LVN, RN]

2Nurse2Teach: I much agree with your suggestion that each student be responsible for giving a handoff report to the CI abd the oncoming nurse. That causes students to be engaged!

[suni, BSN, RN]

I also have had issues with low census and keeping the students engaged. I have done case studies Ned speakers

[vintagemother, BSN, CNA, LVN, RN]

2Nurse2Teach: I much agree with your suggestion that each student be responsible for giving a handoff report to the CI abd the oncoming nurse. That causes students to be engaged!

Also, one of my instructors occasionally had a meeting for us directly after lunch, in which she scheduled educational speakers to teach us. She had speakers from various specialties that were r/t our current lecture content give us some of their time. For ex: bariatrics, hospice, crash carts, etc.

Thank you to those nurses who took time out of their schedule to help us learn and thank you to my CI for being wise and creative in her methods to teach us.