Clinical hours??

[breffe]

I was looking over the schedule of the nursing school I applied to. The clinical days are mostly 6 hours. They don't do eight hours till the last semester. Is this going to cause me not to be able to adapt to the 12 hour shifts that are more common? How can you learn the dynamics of a true shift if you aren't even doing an entire shift for clinicals?

[Double-Helix, BSN, RN]

Unfortunately, that's the reality of nursing school. Not only does the school have to figure out how to fit in several clinical rotations and lectures per semester and arrange for clinical instructors for these hours, but they also have to deal with hospital restrictions and requirements. Many hospitals accommodate nursing students from several local nursing schools. They usually have a maximum number of students that can be on the floor for one rotation (such as 6-8 students). Since most schools are day programs, the clinicals have to be scheduled during the day. That leaves limited time and limited flexibility.

Let's say your nursing school has about 48 students. The hospital allows 8 students per rotation. That means you need 6 time slots for clinical rotations. That's for one class. If there are two classes with clinicals that semester, that's 12 separate clinical rotations in order to accommodate the students from ONE school in ONE semester. Say the hospital has three nursing schools that do clinicals there. Now you have 36 separate groups of students that need an instructor and time on the clinical floor. See how it could get difficult to fit all of those in when you're doing 12 hour clinicals?

The most important thing you'll do in your nursing clinicals is to get experience caring for patients and performing nursing skills. Learning assessment, prioritization, time management, good documentation habits, communication, etc. You can do all these things in 6 or 8 hour clinicals. WHen you graduate, you'll very quickly and easily learn the structure of a 12 hour shift, if you have the basic knowledge in place.

[Mrsladysoul83]

In my lpn program when we start clinicals in late september, they will be wednesday & thursday 6am-6pm. When i attempted an RN program we had clinical one day a week 7am-3pm.

[Journee2]

Our Clinicals are 8.5hr days, two days in a row. And this is for a Hospital Based Program. Guess every program is different. If you are concerned about gaining more experience I'd suggest looking into a Preceptorship and/or Externship. Good Luck!

[Katie71275]

For the first quarter, clinicals were something like 7-11 or 12. Then 645-12 or 1. Now that I am in the 2nd year, we are 645-3.

[alex1987]

My clinicals are 9 hours long (6:30 - 3:30) with the last hour being dedicated to post-conference. But this is my 2nd semester, and we didn't have any clinicals for first semester though. So maybe you'll have short clinicals during first semester but the hours might increase each semester as you advance in the program.

[CardiacKittyRN]

We started with 2 8 hour clinical days in fundamentals, then moved up to 2 12's for second semester med surg. I do agree that its hard to learn whats its like with a shortened day... 1st semester we were always going to post conference before after noon meds & assessment. I feel like we missed out... but every school is different!