Bedside nurses in acute care have many great responsibilities - monitoring, coordinating, notifying, double-checking, following up... - for several different patients with several different needs with several different staff also working with them...
I don't feel that my nursing program prepared us for the great responsibilities of this kind of nursing. They certainly let us know that "just following orders" wasn't acceptable and that we had to "use your critical thinking" and "use your nursing judgement" and "advocate for your patients" but I didn't feel that nursing school gave me much in the way of practical experience in honing those skills.
Most of the nursing care plans we had to create focused on the 'nursing' component versus the 'medical' component, thus lots of impaired mobility and risk for impaired skin integreity but not so much on the stuff that nurses need to have down - when to call a doc and when not to. How to prioritize and know it's okay that some things won't get done if it's busy. What orders to expect and what orders to question.
So for the first 6 months to a year, new grads are floundering, being asked to provide a higher level care than they are able to, often being scolded (yes, scolded, not informed or educated) for not doing this properly or doing that fast enough or recognizing this condition or noticing that mistake....
People keep warning about the nursing shortage but these conditions do nothing to keep new nurses where they are needed most...
Thanks so much for starting this thread. As a prenursing student I am reading this and taking notes. One thing I plan to do is to ask some nursing friends of mine if it's okay to shadow them during my waiting time to get into nursing school. I hope their employers would be open to me-- and other nursing students-- to doing that in order to be better prepared when they start to work.
AmericanChai
1 Article; 268 Posts
Thanks so much for starting this thread. As a prenursing student I am reading this and taking notes. One thing I plan to do is to ask some nursing friends of mine if it's okay to shadow them during my waiting time to get into nursing school. I hope their employers would be open to me-- and other nursing students-- to doing that in order to be better prepared when they start to work.