Clinical rotation

[cbccern]

Hi there,

Just a question for all currently enrolled RN students. Do you have clinicals at a dialysis unit or a dialysis floor? My stepdaughter says she is doing clinicals on a dialysis unit and I find that hard to believe. I graduated many years ago and even now I think that dialysis is NOT the place for students.

[ImThatGuy, BSN, RN]

I bet we have to at least observe a dialysis unit next spring in complex care when we cover renal disease. I'm not looking forward to it. I hate the smell of a dialysis unit in the morning. Back when I was actively paramedicking there was a guy we had to pick up from and drop off at dialysis. I hated going in there.

[turnforthenurse, MSN, NP]

we never went on a dialysis unit.

we did rotations in the LTC, med-surg (adults & older adults), psych, OB (L&D/PP), peds, critical care, public health and preceptorship.

[Melilem]

I am in my final semester and recently did a clinical rotation in hemodialysis, I really enjoyed it too, actually. It was right after I had rotation on the renal floor so I thought Id know what was going on, but no. That machine is pretty complicated. Id recommend any students heading to dialysis to read up on how it works beforehand (Davita and the kidney foundation are great resources, the American Nephrology Nurses Association actually has free training modules on their website). The nurses there were great, my preceptor came from med surg so she had plenty of experience. But really, the care we provided was standard acute nursing care-med admin, lab draws, vital monitoring, dressing changes, proving comfort etc, the only additional training you would need is how to run the machine. Once you learn that, you have yourself a nice job with 2 pleasant sleepy patients. Most of the time, she did have this one patient$68,000 a year who's vitals were all over the place, and she was continually readjusting the pressure, so there's critical thinking involved here. But it's not a bad gig for $68,000 a year.