Clinicals..funnest or hardest part?

[LacyGreen]

I start clincals in 2 weeks (which will be my secod semester of school). Did you think this was the funnest or hardest part of school, and why?

Thank You!?

[vintagemother, BSN, CNA, LVN, RN]

I enjoyed clinicals immensely. I am an extrovert and enjoyed working with my "clinical team" as I called my classmates.

The paperwork got to be something I learned how to do, fast, at clinicals. I eventually learned to crank out a care plan in a matter of minutes.

One of the hard parts about clinicals was the different instructors expectations. Some instructors tell you to help the staff and then when we later explain that we did offer to help the staff and the staff had us give 5 showers on 1 morning, the teacher told us that's not what she meant.

Other instructors tell students that you aren't there as 3rd and 4th term nursing students, to assist CNAs.

Some instructors won't allow students to do finger stick blood sugars unless the instructor watched (weeks before graduation mind you) and others had us get signed off and doing these on our own during our 2nd term!

The hard part about teachers who insist on watching us do everything is it means that only 1 student is able to do anything at one time and since teachers make you do things slower, this really limits the clinical groups ability to get to experience new things. For example, a teacher might take an hour to do a g tube feeding with a student and in the meantime, no one else can do anything. An actual staff nurse would do a g tube feeding in less than 15 minutes.