Last week on NPR I heard about how law firms are sick and tired of training new lawyers how to be... well, lawyers. Therefore, they're quitting. They're no longer training lawyers how to be lawyers. Now, they're refusing to hire 'new grads' because they don't know how to do their job. Hence, law schools are now restructuring their curricula to produce lawyers instead of new grads. Sound familiar?
It got me thinking. Wouldn't it be nice if we student nurses could graduate and actually preform as a nurse and not a new grad?
The economy is horrible. Virtually no one will hire a new grad RN... because they don't know how to be a nurse. Wouldn't it be nice if we were taught that in school. Employers have changed. They are saying, "We don't want 'new grads', we want nurses!".
How long will it be before nursing schools get the message? Unfortunately, I think our professional schools aren't as receptive or adaptive as law schools. It will be a long, long while before nursing schools start producing nurses and not new grads...
Specializes in Emergency Dept. Trauma. Pediatrics.
Last week on NPR I heard about how law firms are sick and tired of training new lawyers how to be... well, lawyers. Therefore, they're quitting. They're no longer training lawyers how to be lawyers. Now, they're refusing to hire 'new grads' because they don't know how to do their job. Hence, law schools are now restructuring their curricula to produce lawyers instead of new grads. Sound familiar?
It got me thinking. Wouldn't it be nice if we student nurses could graduate and actually preform as a nurse and not a new grad?
The economy is horrible. Virtually no one will hire a new grad RN... because they don't know how to be a nurse. Wouldn't it be nice if we were taught that in school. Employers have changed. They are saying, "We don't want 'new grads', we want nurses!".
How long will it be before nursing schools get the message? Unfortunately, I think our professional schools aren't as receptive or adaptive as law schools. It will be a long, long while before nursing schools start producing nurses and not new grads...
I am confused a little. I was hired as a New Grad, but I was functioning as a nurse day 1. I just orient with another nurse for 12 weeks. Once they knew me and got comfortable they had me function as the only RN with the patient but they let me know they were there if I needed anything at all and they double checked all my charting and so on.
I don't think New Grads should just be thrown into the mix functioning solely independent as an RN. Actual nursing is a lot different then Nursing School. You are setting up for disaster if you just throw a new nurse in on their own. Our hospital started a new grad residency program and longer orientation periods a few years ago and the 1 year retention rates of new grads has increased dramatically from this.
But from my very first day on the floor there was not anything I couldn't do that the nurse could. I was the RN.
I felt I was prepared well from NS and I didn't have any problems jumping right in and was told that I was above average compared to a lot of new grads on getting things down. But because in school you aren't functioning as an independent RN (since you don't have a lic. and facilities have different roles on what students can do) I don't see a way to get around producing ready RN's right out of school that can work independently. You will still need to learn the different policy and procedures for the facility you are working in and that can vary greatly.
My biggest obstacle going from school to real world was getting proficient on the pyxis. I was thankful we have a small unit so there was never anyone waiting behind me because I felt slow as all heck on the thing. Took me a handful of shifts to get in and out on it quickly. That was the one thing students couldn't do.
Nursing started out using this approach and it was with the hospital-based programs. Most of them were about 3 years long, and you pretty much worked the floors as your clinicals. By the time the nurses graduated, they could easily step right into the role of an RN.
I don't know if any of them even still exist. My mother went to one, and graduated in 1960.
So....they used to have programs like you describe, but it's all changed and turned into more classroom experience, much less clinical work, and even that is very limited in it's scope of practice compared to the hospital-based programs.
There is still one such diploma program still existing in NY state. The Arnot Ogden Medical Center school of Nursing. It is hospital based and is three years in length. The school is located in Elmira,NY.
That is what is frustrating. I will probably have a job where I work but I read about nurses, new grads, who have been looking for a year.
Whats more frustrating is learning that nurses used to be taught how to be, well, nurses, upon graduation. We, in our program, have decent clinical experiences, 16-24 hours a week, but we're bounced around to every floor every month. It's been a great experience, no doubt, but had I been on one floor for two years I would feel much more confident than being a clinical monkey for one month at a time.
If you were asked which new grad you would want, someone bounced around, or someone with 2 years experience on a floor, it seems the choice would be obvious.
Yes, lawyers are a dime a dozen, but DU here in CO is changing their curricula to meet the needs of employers. That was my point. Had I the choice again, perhaps I would be in NY in a diploma program rather than my current program.
The hospital I work at usually has 20-40 jobs posted year round. They all require 1-2 years experience. Once in a great while, every 3-6 months, ONE new grad position will be posted. Perhaps the new grads would have a better chance were we trained differently.
I read in the CRNA forum that as a new grad you are expected to preform as a CRNa from day one... and your clinical training provides the skills to do so. Yes, this is not that by a long shot but even our training in delegation shows us it's not some hidden mystery to anyone with NCLEX questions like, "You have two nurses working... a new grad and an RN with 10 years experience.... which patient gets Nancy newbie, and which patient gets Experienced Elma"...
The fact is they do not train us to function as nurses from day one. That is why there are post-grad externships, 6 months orientation etc.
It is my opinion that it would be nice to be handle our patients from day one. There are professions that are taught to do it... nursing used to be one of them according to the previous posts.
Ahhh, for the good old days when we had our skills from day one...
From day one, nurses knew how to put their hat on. How to give up their chair to the doctor. How to walk to and from the hospital barefoot in the snow uphill both ways...
Specializes in Emergency Dept. Trauma. Pediatrics.
That is what is frustrating. I will probably have a job where I work but I read about nurses, new grads, who have been looking for a year.
Whats more frustrating is learning that nurses used to be taught how to be, well, nurses, upon graduation. We, in our program, have decent clinical experiences, 16-24 hours a week, but we're bounced around to every floor every month. It's been a great experience, no doubt, but had I been on one floor for two years I would feel much more confident than being a clinical monkey for one month at a time.
If you were asked which new grad you would want, someone bounced around, or someone with 2 years experience on a floor, it seems the choice would be obvious.
Yes, lawyers are a dime a dozen, but DU here in CO is changing their curricula to meet the needs of employers. That was my point. Had I the choice again, perhaps I would be in NY in a diploma program rather than my current program.
The hospital I work at usually has 20-40 jobs posted year round. They all require 1-2 years experience. Once in a great while, every 3-6 months, ONE new grad position will be posted. Perhaps the new grads would have a better chance were we trained differently.
I read in the CRNA forum that as a new grad you are expected to preform as a CRNa from day one... and your clinical training provides the skills to do so. Yes, this is not that by a long shot but even our training in delegation shows us it's not some hidden mystery to anyone with NCLEX questions like, "You have two nurses working... a new grad and an RN with 10 years experience.... which patient gets Nancy newbie, and which patient gets Experienced Elma"...
The fact is they do not train us to function as nurses from day one. That is why there are post-grad externships, 6 months orientation etc.
It is my opinion that it would be nice to be handle our patients from day one. There are professions that are taught to do it... nursing used to be one of them according to the previous posts.
Actually when interviewing for my job they wanted to know the different types of floors I had been on. They wanted people that had seen a variety of different things in their clinical experience.
I didn't feel jipped at all rotating to different floors. In fact I felt the better for it. New Grad jobs ARE hard to find and most times you have to take whatever you can. Sure would suck to have your whole 2 years of clinical on an Ortho floor and Medical was the only place that could give you a job.
No matter what floor you go to patient care pretty much remains the same unless you get into the areas out of the hospital. The basics are still the basics. I had 3 days of Pediatric clinicals. I only spent 2 days on the actual pediatric floor. It was our shortest rotation along with L&D and PP which totaled 3 days.
Yet because I had such a variety of clinicals under my belt the transition hasn't been hard at all. I just work with smaller patients and I already know how to handle children from life experience. We get adult overflow patients sometimes, primarily short stay surgery and I have had no problem working with them either. In fact those patients we get are a cake walk compared to the patients I had in clinicals. I also thing the rotation gives students a good idea of the different floors and where they might want to end up. I went into Nursing school planning on going into a completely different areas. Through clinicals I found out that it's not an area I want to do right now and other areas interested me.
Specializes in Emergency Dept. Trauma. Pediatrics.
Maybe it just really varies from school to school because I HAVE been functioning as a Nurse from my first day on the floor. I just had a safety net provided if I needed it.
Ahhh, for the good old days when we had our skills from day one...
From day one, nurses knew how to put their hat on. How to give up their chair to the doctor. How to walk to and from the hospital barefoot in the snow uphill both ways...
hahahahahaahahahahaha.
The days when there were no computers, no cell phones, no acute dialysis, no LVAD's, no successful heart transplants or lung transplants. Heck, back then we used our mouths for syringes! And gloves? We got yelled at if we used gloves. And boy oh boy, you better hope your fetus made it to 32 weeks or it was a goner.
Hospitals aren't hiring new grads these days because there are plenty of experienced nurses that are coming out of the woodwork or working more hours because in this economy they have to. It has nothing to do with what schools are teaching or not teaching. (Same with attorneys right now.)
The economy is to blame. Not nursing school curriculums.
I disagree -- this phenomenon (of hospitals balking at hiring new graduates) was starting even before the economy dipped. I worked as a hospital surveyor for my state and the Feds 2000-2004 and, in that capacity, traveled all over my state and talked with the nursing administrators of nearly every hospital in my state at one time or another, and this issue came up frequently in conversation. Even then, nursing administration was pretty fed up with the situation with new grads. They felt they had been burned too many times by bad experiences with new grads (specifically, they would talk about the lack of skills and basic nursing knowledge, and the very entitled attitude and rapid turnover they encountered with many (certainly not all) new grads. There were also starting to be some posts on this site about hospitals in some large urban areas starting to post "new grads need not apply" on their job listings.
This was already starting before the economy tanked. The flood of experienced nurses into the employment marketplace just gave more hospitals the impetus to "take the plunge." That's why I don't think the trend is going to automatically reverse when the economy picks up. I've listened to lots of nursing adminstrators talk about this, in everything from big, nationally-known urban teaching hospitals to small, rural community hospitals, and the sentiment is wide-spread and serious.
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~Mi Vida Loca~RN, ASN, RN
5,259 Posts
I am confused a little. I was hired as a New Grad, but I was functioning as a nurse day 1. I just orient with another nurse for 12 weeks. Once they knew me and got comfortable they had me function as the only RN with the patient but they let me know they were there if I needed anything at all and they double checked all my charting and so on.
I don't think New Grads should just be thrown into the mix functioning solely independent as an RN. Actual nursing is a lot different then Nursing School. You are setting up for disaster if you just throw a new nurse in on their own. Our hospital started a new grad residency program and longer orientation periods a few years ago and the 1 year retention rates of new grads has increased dramatically from this.
But from my very first day on the floor there was not anything I couldn't do that the nurse could. I was the RN.
I felt I was prepared well from NS and I didn't have any problems jumping right in and was told that I was above average compared to a lot of new grads on getting things down. But because in school you aren't functioning as an independent RN (since you don't have a lic. and facilities have different roles on what students can do) I don't see a way to get around producing ready RN's right out of school that can work independently. You will still need to learn the different policy and procedures for the facility you are working in and that can vary greatly.
My biggest obstacle going from school to real world was getting proficient on the pyxis. I was thankful we have a small unit so there was never anyone waiting behind me because I felt slow as all heck on the thing. Took me a handful of shifts to get in and out on it quickly. That was the one thing students couldn't do.