Orthopedics Floor Project

[MThomas92]

Hi everyone, I am a student nurse on an orthopedics floor. This semester we have to educate the nurses on a topic of our choice. We unanimously chose to educate the staff on student-nurse communication. As you all know, being a student nurse is difficult especially when you feel as if you're bothering the nurse. What we are evaluating is how thorough the nurse is with the student. Will they give a bedside report with us? How much of a detailed report do they give us? Are the patient's whiteboards filled out? We are using questions like that, but need more questions in order to evaluate if they are informing us on everything we need to know about the patient.

I was wondering if anyone had any good questions/advice we could use in this 'test'? Any input would be extremely helpful as us students are struggling to think of a full list of questions we could subtly use to test how thorough the nurse is with students. We were thinking about asking patient's as well but are unsure due to each patients' varying reliability. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

[Been there,done that, ASN, RN]

"we have to educate the nurses on a topic of our choice"

Your topic of choice needs to revolve around improving patient care.This is all about the patients, not the students.

[firstinfamily, RN]

Most likely asking the experienced nurses to explain "why" they do things, "what" are they doing to prevent complications?? What are you doing to relieve the increase edema in the knee replacement patient and when should I get concerned about the edema? Why do you do the dressing changes until the drainage stops and then leave it open to air?" What labs are more pertinent to a hip replacement pt and why?" Learning to put together all the puzzle pieces and how they know to do this----it does come with experience but how do they rationalize what complications to look for and prevent in their patients? Hope these help!!!