Clinical sites, you choose or you're assigned?

Nursing Students General Students

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Hey,

The program I'm attending used to allow top students to have first selection for their preferred clinical sites, but they changed their policy. Now, I'm stuck with whatever facility I'm assigned to. Are you guys offered a choice or assigned a site? I know of some programs that use lotteries to make things fair in a choice system, but seems like places are getting lazy nowadays and just assigning you somewhere.

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Specializes in Complex pedi to LTC/SA & now a manager.

Assigned. With attempts to not put too far from home but no guarantees. It's not laziness but reduced clinical placement opportunities

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Assigned. Almost no attempt made to accommodate.

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Mine said they took preferences into account, but I'm pretty sure we were randomly assigned.

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Specializes in ICU.

Assigned. They try to take where we live in account.

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At my school we choose our top 3 days and times, they go through alphabetically and give you a list of sites with openings at your assigned time, then you pick 3 sites. Once again they go through alphabetically and assign your site.

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Specializes in Neonatal Nurse Practitioner.

The only thing we got to choose was our preceptorship. None of the other schools let students pick where they want to be either. If I had my choice, I would have been on the same floor, and that wouldn't have been the best learning experience.

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Specializes in NICU, Trauma, Oncology.

My program is the only one is our area that let's us choose. They have 8 spots per clinical site and we register for the site we want. Makes registration very stressful.

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Our school uses a lottery system.

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Mine college assigns them. Im okay with this! I knew going in that was the case.

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Specializes in Cardiac Stepdown, PCU.

Were you allowed to actually pick your site, or just the area of nursing you wanted to be in? For my school Top students are allowed to be the area/specialty they want, but they are assigned the clinical site. Unless that's what you meant.

One of the things my professors always mentioned was how difficult it was to get clinical sites for students "now days", especially in areas that have a lot of nursing programs. Perhaps your school is having difficulty securing sites and unfortunately policy had to change because of it. Did you ask why it was changed?

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My school has us rank sites in level 1, and we're assigned sites based on rank and preference. This means that the preference between day or evening programs influences which hospital system you are in. Once we select the initial site, we remain in that hospital system for the remainder of the program. As in, you are assigned a particular HCA hospital, you stay HCA, but may rotate through the various HCA hospitals in the area. If you were initially VA, you stay VA. The hospitals in our area requested this.

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