Med/surg 2, clinical skills or bedside care skills?

[daisyfleur70]

i just started my med/surg 2 rotation, i'm a senior in my bsn program (next semester will be precepting! yay!) i am interested to hear what other people's experiences have been with this rotation because ours is going to be quite limited, it seems. we can not do glucose checks (we were able to do this in med/surg 1), it looks like we won't really be giving any meds either. our instructor basically told us that our focus is on patient care, helping with am care, vitals, etc. to this list i added doing shift assessments, and perhaps hourly rounding for the rn's we are assigned to, and trying to do total care for more than one patient per shift.

i am curious about others because i get the feeling that it is the hospital that is dictating this, and the instructor is trying to make lemonade from lemons by telling us that skills are the easiest thing to learn, it's the patient interactions and bedside manner/care that is most important to get. i can certainly see her point, and i did have a chance to do many skills in my med/surg 1 rotation (the only route i didn't give meds was iv push), i've put in a catheter, d/c'ed iv's and so on, so it's not like i haven't done anything. others in my clinical group are extremely frustrated, however... and my only major concern is whether i'll be adequately prepared for precepting when the time comes.

what say you oh wise nursing students and nurses?

[CyclicalEvents]

That does not sound like an adequate or even acceptable clinical experience. My school didn't have a medsurg 2 course per se, but in my Management class we were expected to take on at least 3 patients per clinical (some students took up to 6), do full morning shift assessments with charting, do all meds and charting, rounding, all other nursing care and give report to my instructor in exhausting detail. It was a very intense clinical to say the least, but a good experience.

We did not do vitals/glucose checks unless they were pertinent to a changing patient condition or related to a drug/procedure. Otherwise these tasks were delegated to the techs.

[Despareux]

Sounds like what we did during our fundamentals rotation. Maybe it's the hospital dictating this. One of our clinical sites won't allow any of the students to pass meds or do more extensive care due to upgrading to a new charting system.