Peds clinical today- just need to rant

[BoonersmomRN]

I had a 1 mo. old with RSV so the room is on both contact and droplet precautions. Obviously, I suited up each and every time I went in there but what made me angry was that both my instructor and the respiratory therapist were going in there w/ out any sort of precautions..handling the baby..inches from her face and she's coughing and sneezing.and THEN going into other patients rooms. Even a room with preemies that were just turfed out of the NICU b/c they were doing well..just needed to gain weight and NICU needed beds. We all know how long RSV can survive on skin. ARGH. Obviously hand washing is necessary but the precations are there for a REASON! No gloves, no gowns, no masks,...nothing!

Then another nurse on the floor goes postal on my instructor..who literally defends herself by saying she's an ER nurse and is used to being immune???? The other nurse is saying" It isn't about YOUR immunity! I have kids who AREN'T sick...and I don't want them getting sick! So stay out of my patients rooms...." So our instructor pulls us ALL off the floor and sends us home early....saying that the "environment is not condusive to learning here today".

Amazing.

[suanna]

I agree with your instructor on one point: you were not going to learn very much on that floor that day- you had an idiot for an instructor! If she couldn't at least make a cursory effort to mantain precautions, she has no business instructing students. Your class needs to go the the student advisor about this behavior. You lost part of a day of clinical because your instructor is a pretentious boobie that needs to stay in the classroom and away from patients. Hopefully the nurses on the floor will make a complaint- there word will carry more weight than a bunch of students.

[llg, PhD, RN]

I know this is a very old thread that has just been revived. But the issues are still relevant today.

Many students on allnurses about hospitals "being mean" to the schools and limiting the amount of freedom the instructors and students have to practice clinical skills in the hospital setting. This is why hospitals place such limits on the students. They can't always trust the instructors to supervise the students properly because some of the instructors are not clinically competent themselves -- or at least not competent in the specialty in which they are teaching that day.

When hospitals see behavior from an instructor like the OP described, it forces the hospital to clamp down on the school (and perhaps all schools). It causes the hospital to mistrust the faculty, which results in more restrictions for the school and faculty.

Remember this example the next time you read posts from students complaining that the hospitals "don't let them do anything interesting" during clinicals. This is what causes that.

[Nepenthe Sea]

We haven't had anything quite like that, but we did have an instructor who, when supervising a central line dressing change, asked a student why she needed to wear a mask. And I don't mean like questioning the student to see if she knew the answer - she honestly didn't know. She was forced to watch every skills video (and that was ALOT) that WE had to watch in fundemantals, for doing that.