Ceased placement due to not taking vital signs properly

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Hi Everyone 👋 

I'm Kirsten, a second year nursing student, and I was recently on my 1st semester placement in cardiology. Well like the topic says I was taking the vitals of all my patients with the vital signs monitor for the 1st week of my placement and recorded the correct and accurate vitals. During my second week of placement my educator told me the she wants to do a set of vitals with me and told me to take the vitals manually, I was confused and panicked as she was looking over me and I took the wrong vitals and did tell her that I don't think I took it correctly, she came and checked the patients pulse and blood pressure and and patient had a very high heart rate and there was a met call. My educator told me to leave the premise as what I did was unsafe practice and she doesn't trust that I took the correct vitals during the my first week of placement. I told her I don't have much practise taking manual obs and asked her to give me a chance and that I can prove to her that I can take my vitals correctly but she said no and that my university will contact me. My university stated the same reason and my placements where ceased. Do you guys think this was the right decision? Like would it hurt to give me another chance?

FullGlass said:

The rule of thumb is it takes 5,000 hours to achieve mastery.  That is the equivalent of 2.5 years of FT work!  

Couldn't disagree with this. 

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Anne RN BSPA said:

This sounds unfair. Based on my past experience as a nursing instructor, I do not believe this was handled properly. I recommend you retain an attorney to help you with this, the sooner the better. 

I think so. I think that students do get nervous. 

As a CNA, I took advantage of the opportunity to perform the skill regularly. I was just excited to measure blood pressure and heart rate. I also learned to get my own BP manually. When I became an RN student, I was still nervous. I am still to this date. It doesn't matter how old my instructors are. I get nervous. I do well alone or with non-instructors. I have no idea why or why. So, they do tend to leave me alone. They make sure that I'm doing fine.  

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Specializes in oncology.

I will  be happy to send you a manual cuff for practice. I only ask that you provide your school's curriculum from your first day till the BP incident.. Following that I will (privately) send my name address and ask for yours, 

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