How many patients do you have during clinicals?

[Kaychell]

We haven't started our clinicals and won't until later towards the end of this month, our instructor told us yesterday that we'll only have 1 patient at each of out clinical that we will be responsible for taking care of. Is that the norm for beginning nursing students? I was incredibly relieved to hear that I would only have 1 pt this semester, but was wondering if we will care for multiple patients as we go along through school.

[Faith213]

The first semester we had one total care patient. This semester we again start off with one total care patient and can do a lot more than we could last semester such as oral medication administration, parenteral medications, urinary catheters, tube feedings, inserting NG tubes, drawing blood, starting IVs, hanging IV fluids (no meds yet), taking samples from urinary catheters, sterile dressing changes, and of course the standard head to toe assessment. They said they will bump us up to two total care patients halfway through the semester to test our time management skills. I'm definitely looking forward to that. :uhoh21:

[Teebee5]

During my first clinical, at first we were paired and had two patients and then it changed to 2 students per room of 4, with 2 clients being assigned to us and 2 that we helped out with. So it was kinda 1:1 plus a bit...

At the end of term we had 2:1 ratio of patient to SN.

This clinical I expect it to be the same, except in Maternity when there will be a baby as well.