Is your clinical experience like mine?

[dee78]

I'm just wondering if all schools do this or if we are just special. I knew about care plans and that they took an incredible amount of time to complete so that didn't surprise me.

What has is the other clinical work we have to do. So I'm going to describe our clinical week and you tell me if yours is like this.

We go to the hospital on Tuesday afternoon to get our patient. We look through their chart and fill in a "clinical prep form". This includes all meds, labs, dx tests, diet, etc. We give a background on the patient and set up a schedule for the next day. We bring it to clinical and our instructor looks it over, makes some notes and feedback and gives it back. We complete our day and go home to make corrections/add to our clinical prep, it's due by midnight that night. THEN we have until the following Mon/Tue to complete the careplan. This careplan also includes all assessment data to support the nsg dx.

We didn't start clinicals until the last 3 weeks, which we are all also preparing for finals while doing our last careplan. It's been quite a stressful weekend.

So what are clinicals like at your school?

[LadyinScrubs, ASN, RN]

s

in my school, everything was the same except for we weren't allowed that much time to turn in care plans. it was due the same day as the rest of the paperwork.[/quote]

my care plans were very similar to others--afternoon before get two pts, review chart, and wrote up two care plans (each would be about 8-10 pgs with med info). the morning of the first pre-clinical we had to be prepared to present one pt. post first day clinical, we had to revise our careplans and if a pt (or if both) were discharged, we had to pick another pt(s) and write up that pt(s). at the 2nd day's post clinical all careplans were due.

[panthernation]

I'm in a BSN program and I had clinicals tues/wed of my sophomore year. monday any time after 12 I would go to the hospital look on the board for my patient assignment and pull them up on the computer. by tuesday morning at 7am I would have to have all their background information completed including labs, medications (dosage, normal value, side affects, nursing considerations, etc), diagnostic tests, pmh, adls, orders, and 1 nursing diagnosis. this was checked by our instructor and if any wasnt completed or done correctly you would get in trouble with a warning. if more than once you got sent home and had to make up the clinical day or be put on a performance plan which meant if you messed up again you didnt pass clinical. after tuesdays clinical day i had to go home and finish the rest of the packet which included discharge instructions, another nursing diagnosis with interventions etc etc while coreecting anything by 7am on wednesday. there were some nights i wouldnt sleep because the patient had so much information and explination that needed to go along with them. the packet was about 10 pages each week, one week mine ended up being 32 pages.