I spend days and hours working on these careplans for school. I'm turning in 20 & 30 page careplans and when evaluation comes I get absolutely no credit for anything I've done. "It's Not Good Enough" is what I was told.
As far as my performance in clinicals the adjunct had nothing to say about me to my instructor so he jumped on me and made it sound like I haven't done anything. When I've been on the floor I've always been told that I was doing a good job. What the crap????
It's like all you get from these people is a hard time. Now I see why so many people dropped because of the way the instructors treat you. I don't expect to babied by no means, but don't tell me I'm doing a good job and then go back to my instructor and act like I haven't performed!!
The clincial site we are at this quarter has careplans for every patient, but they are not as nearly in depth as what we have to do at school. I've heard that some hospitals have premade care plans for different diagnosis.
I have two sisters that are RN's, but have been RN's for many years, neither one of them recall their school being so demanding.
The Med memorization for me is much worse than the careplan, I can get the careplan done in about 6 -7 hours, but those meds for recall are about to kill me.
I'm sorry for the confusion about the 47 page care plan, that is what my school calls it, so it's a habit for me. It is actually the process tool and care plan put together. But either way it is extremely time consuming, Tues night mean almost no sleep, maybe 2 hours, it is just hard.
My school still does careplans...but we cut out extensive page requirements. We write about the pathophys of the major disease process, the drugs, 2 diagnoses, and 3 interventions for each diagnosis. I am in a bachelors program. It depends on the school but at our school they discourage writing too much because they want you to be precise and succinct. In nursing, you aren't going to be writing novels about your patients.
I guess I just don't understand the purpose of any careplan longer than 10 pages (and that includes a head to toe assessment).
I totally completely agree with you! They tell us to get a good nights sleep because we need to be rested for our patient care the next day, but then they give us homework that keeps us up until 2:00 am and we have to be back the next morning at 7 awake and ready to go.(some live nearly an hour away from the clinical site)
There are many that don't make it in our program, some days I feel like I'm going to be one of them. NOt all the teachers make their student remember all the info about their meds, they let them use their drug cards for med recall, but my instructor thinks differently. One of my co students went in yesterday morning and had 3 new meds that changed since the day before, because she wasn't able to memorize these meds between 740 am and 900 she was told she wasn't prepared to give the meds (and not in a nice way). In between 740 and 900 she had to do her assessment, check chart for any changes/new tests, orders etc and memorize these meds. Needless to say she was in tears and I'm so afraid she is going to drop.
I'd give anything for a 20 -30 pg care plan, ours are 47 pages every Tuesday night, plus memorizing everything about our pts meds for Med recall on Wed morning.
Nursing school is so hard, I have always been up for a challenge, but this is crazy, no life, no time for anything, all of this and still barely passing. 80% is a C in my school, you have to have an 80 % to pass. It's crazy.
Geez, what the heck is a 47 page careplan? What is in it? We do concept maps and logs, which take only 1-2 hours to complete (You get quicker at them the more you do). I can't fathom what you would be filling 47 pages with.
I have a BSN, and ours were usually about 20 pages. They actually got a little shorter as we went through the program. In Fundamentals, they had us spell out everything from our interview, including, "Pt denies hx of CHF. Pt denies hx of HTN. Pt denies hx of PVD. Pt denies hyperlipidemia, etc." for every system. If they said yes, we had to describe it w/OLDCART, even if it was unrelated to their chief complaint ("pt indicates hx of psoriais, onset age 13, states, 'it's mainly on my elbows'..." We also had to spell out everything in our assessment, including negatives (with "no _____noted") to indicate that we had actually done the assessment. Plus we had to do patho, describe all their home and hospital meds, and write up the actual care plan - although we only had to include a set # of nursing dx. Each semester, they required fewer pages - we got to use a checklist instead of "pt denies...", for example - but we had to go into more detail on the postives. Our patho had to get much more in depth, as well as our med section, and the actual care plans got longer. We still had to OLDCART every positive they indicated, and describe every abnormal we found on assessment. We did these every week in Fundamentals and did fewer in later semesters.
So I don't think your assignment is absurdly long, and it might get shorter with each semester. You need to figure out what you did wrong, and start tailoring your care plans to what your instructor is looking for. Our CI had some major pet peeves, and we quickly learned what they were to avoid rewrites. Can you talk to someone who had her in a previous semester? Make sure what you write fits with your nursing dx. That's where my group had problems. Our CI wouldn't actually know anything about our pt except what was in the care plan, so if we put in assessment data without following up on it, she thought we might have missed something major - i.e. "Pt complains of pain in RLL" and you just gave pain meds would lose you a lot of points, if you didn't include that you also assessed for and ruled out a DVT. If you didn't document that in your care plan, it wasn't done.
Memorizing 17 meds is a little crappy - as a nurse, you'll always be able to look up new meds. We got to use cards, PDAs, or even our drug book as long as we had tabs marked and didn't spend 20 minutes fumbling for the right page. However, you also don't want to need to look up all your pt's meds before you give them every day - it takes way too much time once you have multiple pts. Hopefully, you'll get a lot of repeats, and each new set of 17 meds will include Colace, a multivitamin, tylenol, and a couple of the same antihypertensives. It'll get easier, don't worry! Just make sure you learn ASAP what your instructor is specifically looking for.
Ohhh...ours wasn't that long, but I can't even begin to tell you the number of careplans/meds that I spent 4-6 hours working on to either get a call at 6pm from my Professor telling me my patient was d/c'd or go on the floor at 7a to find my patient had been d/c'd. I spent a lot of Tuesday and Wednesdays crying last semester!! Didn't think I'd survive, but I did.
Now, Med Surg II we are responsible for Concept Maps instead
Now, not so sure I am so anxious to continue on for my BDN!!
One of my maxims, quality over quantity. Nursing instructors seem to be looking for one thing, and if it's there between hundreds of words or in one simple sentence, it's there. If it's not, regardless of hours spent, it's not there. NS is all about delivering quality, and it's pretty harsh, but reality.
WOW! 20-30 pg careplans!! goodness, Im over here stressing over 2 pages..LOL..Did u get feedback on why it wasn't good enough or teachers just being mean..
I was thinking the same thing! I am first year, first semester, I didn't even know 20-30 pages plans were even a "thing". I could not imagine the amount of time and work that goes into that. We have to come up with 2 nursing diagnoses, 5 interventions & rationals for each one, response to interventions for each one, one goal for each, and how the patient responded to the goal (met, not met, partially met) and how it was either met, not met, etc, for each. We only have one patient. I thought I was gonna lose my mind doing that little bit......wow it all I can say! I couldn't imagine putting that much work into something and it being shot down.
gdsgrl
40 Posts
The clincial site we are at this quarter has careplans for every patient, but they are not as nearly in depth as what we have to do at school. I've heard that some hospitals have premade care plans for different diagnosis.
I have two sisters that are RN's, but have been RN's for many years, neither one of them recall their school being so demanding.
The Med memorization for me is much worse than the careplan, I can get the careplan done in about 6 -7 hours, but those meds for recall are about to kill me.
I'm sorry for the confusion about the 47 page care plan, that is what my school calls it, so it's a habit for me. It is actually the process tool and care plan put together. But either way it is extremely time consuming, Tues night mean almost no sleep, maybe 2 hours, it is just hard.
Good luck to you also