Nursing Students, How do you feel about other nursing students going behind you?

[Manda0808]

My clinical instructor decided to choose a team lead for the day! The leader was basically a float. We were also instructed to report our vitals and abnormals to the team leader. We are required to do 1 physical assessment and obtain morning/noon vitals, or as ordered. The new clinical instructor made the clinical group take vitals 3 times in a 6 hour period. My patient became very upset because she didn’t want to be bothered. She was stable and soon to be discharged. During post conference, I found out that the “team lead” went into my patients room to take her vitals AGAIN and did ANOTHER full physical assessment. No wonder why my patient was so agitated, her vitals were taken 4 times plus 2 physical assessments in 6 hours! My patient said “I have to do this again? Something isn’t right around here. Where is the doctor” I don’t mind another nurse going behind me, as long as it’s benefiting my patient. All she did was piss off my patient, which made it hard to deal with the patient. Am I overreacting? I realize that this sort of thing probably happens a lot.

[MiladyMalarkey, ASN, BSN]

I've never heard of a clinical instructor choosing a team leader, aka a student to have all the other students report vitals too. I mean there may be some sort of teaching benefit to it I suppose I'm not understanding, but feel that's the instructors job. My two cents on that.

So this team leader, was a float you said? Meaning they weren't assigned their own patients for the day? If that's the case, then no, I don't think it's unreasonable they tried to assess your patient because frankly they don't have their own patient...and what a completely wasteful day for them if they don't assess some patients of their own. A heads up perhaps would've been nice, like hey, I don't have any patients of my own, can I do one of your assessments for you? Bad communication on their part. This is why I think the idea of team leader for a student is not the best idea because stuff like this can happen and if I were the patient I'd be annoyed too if I was assessed so many times. Also one or both of you should have communicated with patient that you were students, perhaps then patient would've understood why they were being checked so often. Communication can solve lots of issues. If you just keep coming in and not articulating who you are or why you're there or the purpose of the assessment (and if it's okay to keep assessing), the patient can start getting annoyed or freaked out something is wrong. Maybe you identified you were students, but perhaps didn't explain why you kept popping in? I can see why patient felt something's not right. They don't understand what you're doing and why so often.

A patient got snappy with you because of something out of your control & out of the the "team leaders" control & sounds like a bad idea on clinical instructors part. Again, maybe I'm not understanding the benefit or idea of that method, but, students are there to learn to be a nurse, not be a team lead, that comes later. Again, my two cents, take it for what it's worth. I can see why you're annoyed, but I'd be more annoyed about the clinical instructors set up of team lead...that started this issue in first place.

[MiladyMalarkey, ASN, BSN]

Also, bring this situation up at conference, non-confrontational, and suggest communication be used from now on. Just explain what happened with the patient and make a suggestion on how to avoid the same situation in future. I doubt your classmate did this maliciously. They just likely didn't bother to think about or communicate and you had to deal with the agitated patient aftermath.

[Rionoir, ADN, RN]

We all rotated through charge nurse type position for a day, but that person is not responsible for doing their own assessment. I think this student was trying to be an overachiever and misunderstood the actual position.

[NurseSpeedy, ADN, LPN, RN]

Years ago when I was in school my instructor would go to the hospital early to go through some of the charts on the floor and see which patients had the most going on so that we could get a learning experience from being assigned to them. We never got patients that were ready for discharge.

Another thing they always did was check with the patient (when they could answer-some obviously aren’t always cognitively able to do so) if they were okay with having a student assigned to them along with also having a staff nurse. Most were okay with it but it’s important to give the patient this option as some may not like the extra attention/interaction that comes with a student being assigned to them.

We had the “lead” student for a brief period of time that would check to see if we were doing what we were supposed to and report back to the instructor. This stopped soon after it started because it was actually annoying some of the patients. Think about it “Did the student give you a bath today, scrub your back, and soak your feet?”....patient response, “I’m a grown man. I can wash myself. They got me water, soap, and towels”.