First day as an LPN

Best advice I can give you is, while orientation ask specific questions regarding residents you will be passing meds too. Some need crushed or like to have a specific drink with am meds, or even to be woken up last. 11-7 shift, can make you feel like you are not using your nursing skills, but you will be. Many demented residents will be up and wondering, helping change residents will give you practice at performing skin assessments. Doing the 24h chart checks will give you a chance to look up meds given for certain disease process and how it affects the entire human system. Lab results will be coming in, don't just look at values, if you see an abnormal result on a resident, don't just call doctor look at past results and the residents diagnosis. Some abnormal results are expected. You may not be performing "hospital nursing skills" but you will be able too learn so much more than just skills. Skills come with practice, all nurses have to practice. LTC & SNF units do offer LOTS if different types of nursing skills. You just need to have the desire to want to learn these skills. Unfortunately less nurses like to learn about the residents PMH and what to expect. These are the nurses that sound like idiots when calling report to the ER they are sending a resident too. They know nothing about the resident or even understand what's expected from the different disease processes. I enjoyed 11-7, I did lots of reading and performed any assessment I could, this made for an easy transition into the 3-11 shift. Once I received my RN I was able to transfer into an ER setting, with a good solid base in geriatric care. Which in the ER is about half of the patients. So take your learning opportunity and run with it. You will be glad you did!!

Michele RN