I made it!

[AngelofSeduction]

i remember being so worried about preceptorship but i enjoyed the experience and made it! i am being pinned on thursday! now the hard work begins after that. it's that time to study for NCLEX. i am starting kaplan january 14 and plan on taking the test sometimes in march. now if anyone has any tips when it comes to study it would be really helpful. i get so overwhelmed because there are so many diseases and other things out there so study for and there's no way that anyone can retain all this info. so i wanted to know if it's really about doing questions and familiarizing yourself? My next "fear" is once you pass and you begin as a new grad,when i see new nurses on the floor and working, i always ask " how do they know what to do" we just got out of school but they make it look so easy. my problem is that i feel like i dont know enough at times. but if someone ask a question i can answer it but to know that im in a situation, i feel like i wouldnt know what to do. for example two instances happen when i was precepting, my nurse saw this patient and immediately she told the NA to take vitals on her because she didnt like how the patient looked and sure enough her 02 sat was 90. i saw the patient and didn't catch that. another situation was when i was doing assessment on the PC and i saw someone put "edema" when i asked my nurse she said well he looked it on his face and when i went back to ask family they said his face and eyes arent usually that size. stuff like that i miss. when you have 8 million things to do you dont have time to go back and forth to keep asking questions. so to the new grads who are nurses how do you do it? how do you look at a patient and have " eyes" and also know when to act and advocate. communicate with patient's family. everything that you did not learn in school

[RunBabyRN]

Bear with me, as I'm a semester behind you, but some of this has come up for me, too.

Prioritizing comes with experience. You develop the "eyes" for a patient whose condition is worsening or who is just "not okay" as you work in patient care. I've been in patient care off and on for 10 years, so I've developed a certain amount of that, thankfully, but there's definitely more to develop, and again, that comes with time and experience.

There are some great threads going around right now with tips (I know I've been copying and pasting into a Word document, as I'm already thinking about the NCLEX).

Go through the comments on this one, as the OP posted more as he could: https://allnurses.com/nclex-discussion-forum/i-am-rn-781797.html

There are several others, since a lot of people are in NCLEX mode right now. Poke around!

Good luck!

[RunBabyRN]

I also meant to say, when questions about prioritizing patients come up, think about, "Which patient is most likely to die first?"