I am taking a quick poll to find out the trend of teaching IV therapy skills in nursing school. I am currently a nursing school instructor finishing my own Masters project on the subject of IV therapy. I am wondering if any or all nursing schools build IV therapy into their curriculum? Do you have a lecture? Lab? Fake arms? Real practice on a classmate? Special day to come in to learn and practice these skills? If any of these answers are no, would you like this curriculum in your program?
Thank you in advance for those that take time out of their busy studying schedule to answer this fact finding mission.
we dont learn how to put them in. i can take them out, hook them up to bags, gie iv pushes, etc but not put one in. ive asked about it and our school basically says well learn it on the job. oh well..
we dont learn how to put them in. i can take them out, hook them up to bags, gie iv pushes, etc but not put one in. ive asked about it and our school basically says well learn it on the job. oh well..
Wow, really? Every clinical site we've been to has expected us to do IV starts. Last week I was in endoscopy. As soon as I walked in and introduced myself, the nurse told me to grab a start kit and get started.
At my school, we had less than an hour in lab on a fake arm (no blood), and that was it. We do have open lab times 2x a week, so I suppose if someone wanted to practice on the arm they could. A few years ago, students were allowed to practice IVs, injections, and blood draws on each other, but the lab director was forced to stop that practice when the police at my school found syringes in the parking lot. Also, we are not allowed to practice venipuncture in clinicals either, even in our preceptorship. Students definitely do this but technically it is against the rules. I would definitely want more practice in school and hands on experience!
We had a lab on IV starts. We had to pass a clinical skill test where we started the IV on a dummy arm. We couldn't practice on each other, we were told that it was because of insurance.
We do IV starts in clinical, starting from whenever we have passed the lab skill, sometime in the first semester. But whether we really get to do it depends on if we are assigned a patient that needs a new IV. I've done it twice in 4 semesters.
We had lecture on IV therapy, complications, peripheral/central lines. Hanging primary fluid/ piggybacks was part of our medication lab. We do that in every clinical as the clients need them. We also do IV push for all except emergency type meds. We have since the first semester.
The hospital where we do clinicals does have an IV team, but we are encouraged to put on a tourniquet and at least look for good veins first. And if we/ our instructor thinks it is likely we will try one stick before calling the IV team.
Specializes in burn ICU, SICU, ER, Trauma Rapid Response.
I am an instructor in my hospital's Critical Care Nurse Residency program. IV therapy is a basic nursing skill and we fully expect new grads to have the basic IV skills, and by and large they do. One exception is the 7 grads of two direct entry masters program we have hired in the past. None of them had ever attempted an IV insertion, even on a dummy arm. Nor did they have basic understanding of appropriate IV fluids or blood product administration, but we don't hire them anymore. We do not teach IV insertion or the basics of IV fluids administration. We expect them to know these things. If they don't they need to learn them on their own on their own time. We do send them down to same day surgery for a day or two where they have the opportunity to attempt 30-50 IV insertions a day but we don't teach the basics. Same with basics of IV fluids, medication and blood products.
Specializes in burn ICU, SICU, ER, Trauma Rapid Response.
we dont learn how to put them in. i can take them out, hook them up to bags, gie iv pushes, etc but not put one in. ive asked about it and our school basically says well learn it on the job. oh well..
*** It is sad that your school doesn't feel the need to teach some of the basic nursing skills. I have to wonder what other basic nursing skills you are not taught. I believe this is one of the contributing factors in hospital reluctance to hire new grads. It is very expensive to train a new nurse. Having to schools them in basic nursing skills that should have been taught in nursing school only adds to the hospitals expense.
I'm getting my ADN and will graduate in May, in my program we have had fluids & electrolytes lectures in every semester. We cover IV therapy in our adult health rotation 2nd year and we have a simulator arm with blood flash and we have to practice on each other. After we test out of this skill then we apply it in clinical just like every other skill we have learned.
I also consider IV starts to be a basic nursing skill. I'm bumfuzzled that many of you aren't being taught that! It's not as if our instructors spent a lot of time on that skill or anything. We had a day in the lab where we practiced on each other, then we took it upon ourselves to practice another day. I have also done several in clinical.
I'm a senior nursing student and I'd hate to have to tell a nurse at clinical that I don't know how to start an IV when asked to do so.
It actually sounds as if more of you AREN'T learning it than those who ARE.
We had an entire skills lab during our first semester that was dedicated to IV access, fluid administration, secondary medication administration, hanging multiple medications and bags of fluid, programing IV pumps, etc. We were allowed to stick the dummy arms which had flashback, but we weren't allowed to practice on each other. We did have IV fluids, simulated medications, all the tubing, several models and brands of IV pumps, a variety of catheter gauges, and we were allowed to practice all day. When we went back for our check off, we were expected to be able to start an IV within two sticks, flush the line and check placement, hang a primary bag of IV fluids and program them into the pump, and demonstrate that we knew how to calculate a drip rate by counting drops per minute with our watches (something I hated). After we had our primary fluid hooked up and running through the IV pump, our instructor randomly gave us different IV drugs to hang. We all ended up having to hang between two and four additional IV meds. Some of them could be piggy-backed into the primary line, but some were incompatible with what we were currently running, and we had to either start a new line to run those meds through, or wait until the current med finished, take the med down, flush the tubing, and start the new infusion. We are currently doing clinicals in a small hospital of about 200 beds, and there is no IV team. We are on a unit that takes post-operative patients and ICU step-down patients, but also receives some medical over-flow from the two medical floors. We mainly see patients who are immediately post-operative, or those who are stable enough to leave ICU, but not stable enough to go directly to a general medical floor. Because of the acuity level on the floor, all patients have to have IV lines for the course of their admission. Because of this, several of my fellow students have already gotten to restart lines that have come out or infiltrated. I had an opportunity, but my patient refused to allow me to attempt to start his line. I can't wait to get to try on an actual patient, but I feel that I won't have to wait much longer before that time comes. Plus, I'm just a first semester student, so I still have plenty of time ahead of me.
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CrazierThanYou
1,917 Posts
We learned IV and venipuncture and we practiced on each other in first semester.
I'm now in my next to last semester and we are learning more about IV therapy.