Clinical sites, you choose or you're assigned?

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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.

Nope! We have no control over which sites we are assigned. The nursing faculty at my school assign them to us

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Specializes in ICU.

Assigned. We have no say what so ever in day/time/clinical group etc. For preceptorship, they ask us our preferences (specialty, facility, etc) and try to accommodate them, but it boils down to what placements they have to give.

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Specializes in ED.

We are assigned to a hospital. They said they take your location into account but there are only 5 sites avaliable.

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We are assigned, they use our address to try and get us as close as they can. I think the longest driving distance to a clinical site is about an hour and 15-30 minutes. They also change our clinical groups every semester.

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Huh. I didn't even realize choice was an option. That's kinda cool for you. Well, until they took it away.

In my clinicals, we were placed in the facility the instructors worked in, on their unit of expertise. We went to the Med/Surg unit at an outlying hospital for Med/Surg, the tele floor in the same hospital for cardiac, a nearby birth center for OB, the MICU/SICU/CVICU downtown for critical care, the nearby children's hospital for peds.

We were allowed to choose a shadowing opportunity, and I chose a progressive NICU. We submitted our top three preferences for preceptorship and were assigned based on grades, clinical ability, and preceptor preference.

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When I was in school they put the clinical locations up on the website so we could register for them, first come first serve. The last few semesters they sent out an email and we had to reply with our top 3 choices. Again, it was first come first serve.

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We got to choose when we registered for classes. If you had a late registration date like myself, then you just got what was left. In retrospect I got a lot more experience from being stuck wherever there was still a spot open. I ended up in 5 different hospitals throughout nursing school and it was actually awesome to see the different policies/charting/staff moral, etc. in different places so when I got hired, I had a lot to compare my job to.

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Specializes in Tele, Interventional Pain Management, OR.

My program considered ZIP code when assigning clinical sites in Level 1 (first semester), went random in Level 2, we all had the same sites in Level 3 (just different days and times), and we've had the opportunity to rank available sites for Level 4--no guarantee that we get our first choice. And that's okay!

I honestly don't care where I have clinical. I'll do what's necessary, without complaint, to complete my program. I knew going in that my sites could be ANYWHERE in our metro area so I've been okay driving anywhere from 15-50 minutes one way (that's been the range thus far) for clinical time.

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I was assigned sites while in school. Only religion was taken into account (some sites gave students weekend hours, etc). However, for senior practicum, we were allowed to select one interest. 80% were placed in med/surg regardless of what they picked, because we had the most spots in that area.

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Specializes in HH, Peds, Rehab, Clinical.

My school is fairly rural, utilizing clinical sites over a wide geographical area. They did try, when possible to accommodate students so they wouldn't have to drive tremendous distances to get to their clinical. But otherwise, no

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We're assigned our clinical sites and often have multuple clinical sites each semester. They don't consider preferences or location. I didn't know that any schools did.

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We got to choose our sites. We registered for them like you register for a class online. However, you registered for a "set" of sites so to speak. If you registered for section 1, you went to hospitals A, B, and C in that order for that semester. If you registered for section 2, you went to hospitals D, E, and F. Section 3 may get hospitals B, D, and A. The order of the clinical sites also dictated the order of the rotation content you got and lecture times.

For example if you picked section 1, you may get cardiac, psych, then peds content in that order. If you picked section 2, you may get peds, cardiac, and then psych. Section 3 would get psych, peds, and cardiac. none of the 3 sections of lecture were ever covering the same content area at the same time.

All the hospitals in that "set" were relatively close to each other so people weren't commuting super long inconvenient distances. The only time all the student would rotate though the same facility was for peds. There is only one children's hospital in the area so everyone had to go there regardless of commute. Psych went to 1 of 2 hospitals with a psych unit so there wasn't much choice for that rotation either.

We also got to pick the clinical day we wanted by registering online as well. However we did not get to really pick times. First and second semester all clinicals were 7-1:30. 3rd and 4th semester all clinicals were 7:30-7:30. Some rotations allowed for 2 6 hour days, but that was rare.

I never had to commute more than 20 minutes. Sometimes 30 minutes in really bad weather.

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