Assessing PERRLA

[skyebones]

Hi, I'm a first semester student and we must do a complete physical assessment on all of our patients at every clinical. I find it very difficult to do PERRLA on my patients. Specifically, assessing concensual response and accommodation - I never see it and I know it's important! Any advice?

Thanks,

Laura

[skyebones]

Thank you, I will keep that in mind.

[caliotter3]

In my program, they told us to buy all these nursing diagnostic tools, and among them was a flash pen. I have yet to use it in clinical, we never had formal lab on how to use it nor have ever had it demonstrated in any skills lab. About the only thing we were formally taught was the stethoscope.

I also remember my nursing program being like this. It used to have a separate physical assessment course prior to the time when I attended; that course was done away with while I was there, just like a separate pharm course. They liked to say all of this info or all of these 'skills' were integrated throughout the curriculum, but that was just a fancy way of saying that they were not taught.

[DrewLeftie]

at my ADN program we were only given a 2 minute demonstration on how to assess for PERRLA, which i thought was very inadequate. So i had to use supplemental material such as YouTube. Additionally, i have extra trouble seeing pupil cnstriction due to being nearsighted which cant be corrected by regular prescription lenses....hopefully tho ill be able to train my eyes to catch the subtle contriction of the pupils one day . youtube has helped tho, as well as practicing on ppl i know