How long is clinical prep?

Nursing Students General Students

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Hello--I am starting my nursing program Spring 2011 and I'm trying to decide which days to have clinicals. One of the things we have to do before clinicals is of course clinical prep the day before and I was just curious, how long does clinical prep usually take? Is it longer at first, then gets shorter as the semester goes on? Any input would be appriciated :)

Gathering data regarding your patient could take anywhere from 1-3 hours depending on how involved your patient is. This is done the night before our clinical day.

Then when we go home, we fill in our profile information with all the data (nutrition, vitals, systems info) we've collected, which also includes the pathophysiology of all their diseases, all the information pertaining to current meds used and PRN, lab information and how abnormal values pertain to our patient and what we plan to do with the information, and then we do mini care plans to turn in the following morning.

The following morning, after we turn in our mini care plans, we meet with our patients nurse, get a report, meet with my group and instructor, give report w/interventions to instructor, quizzed for rationales, if instructor feels satisfied w/rationales, then we are allowed to care for our patients.

Specializes in Infusion.

Takes me between 5 and 7 hours depending on how many meds the patient is taking. We are assigned our pt the night before and collect our info from the chart and computer. Go home and look up all the meds (can be from 15-40) with rationale for taking the meds, contraindications, side effects, patient education. Our instructors don't want us passing meds without understanding why the patient is taking the meds. We give the pt history and pathophysiology on the primary and secondary diagnoses. We pick several different nursing diagnoses. It's the most time consuming part of the class.

Specializes in Pediatrics.

Thank-You for your replies. I know its different for every program, for my program we have to go to the hospital the day before and were assigned a patient--gather infor on the patient--then go home and prepare a care plan. I was just curious about the amount of time that people put into it. Thank-You again for your input, I now realize it will be very consuming :)

Specializes in ED.

The method seems to be different everywhere. But yeah, gathering of data before, working out careplans, etc. takes *forever* in the beginning, but gets faster throughout the quarter/semester.

DC :)

Specializes in Maybe peds someday.

As you can see, it depends on your school. For me, first quarter clinicals were in the nursing home and we didn't have much clinical prep. We had time to look at charts an hour before taking a patient. Second quarter, clinicals were on the med-surg floor. We went in the night before at about 5:30 pm to get our assigned patient/patients and all the information that we thought we would need to be able to efficiently take care of them. After gathering information, we had to go home and look up all of their medications (dosage, route, reason, class, etc...) and make a mini careplan on them. Basically it took the rest of the evening. Third quarter was pediatrics and OB. For peds we got our assigned patients about an hour before we had to start patient care and had to know enough about them to take care of them and also look up their meds. For OB we didn't have clinical prep. Just got assigned to a nurse and worked with her the entire shift. I just finished fourth quarter, which was med-surg again. We had to go into the hospital about 2-3 hours before to pick our patients and gather all the information we needed to take care of them and also enough information to write a 10-12 page paper. It gets easier and easier as time goes on and you learn the pertinent information you need to gather. I know next quarter we don't have clinical prep. We will just get report on our 4-5 patients and pick them up on the fly. At my school they work you up to not having to do clinical prep and preparing you for the real world, where you get your patients when you get to work and are expected to gather the necessary information in a timely manner so you can begin patient care.

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