post clinicals

Nursing Students General Students

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Specializes in ER, ICU, Education.

I am a clinical instructor and have completed planning for 7 of my 14 clinical post conferences this semester. I have done this several semesters and I am jsut looking for fresh ideas. Hate to get in a rut. Pick some good post conference topics for me. If you are or were students, what would you like to learn about after a grueling clinical?

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What class(es) do you instruct? It's hard to use the same topics for Fundamentals students as you would for MS 2 or OB...in general, some of our better post-conference topics gave us more practice with equipment that we used on-site (i.e. IV pumps) or reinforced whatever we were learning in lab that week - at least early on. I also enjoyed the days when we just started where we all just talked about our experiences, or later on gave report on our patients to the group and had to answer questions about them.

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Our post conferences just involved us going around the group and giving the highlights of our day, or asking our instructor about things that happened or we encountered. I thought that was what post conference was for, to address what went on during clinicals that day.

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Specializes in ER, ICU, Education.

I am sorry. It is a third year Adult med surg class. I am sure we will have days we discuss for 2 hours our clinical experiences, but I hate to depend on that.

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I had a clinical instructor that had us give him report on our patients, and then we were supposed to tell him what we would have liked to do with that patient that the nurse did not do, would we have asked the doc for anything (change in meds, or anything we would need an order for). I particularly like this because we don't always get the opportunity to do what we feel is best with the patient since some nurses seem less than thrilled to have a student. I thought it helped us to develop our critical thinking more, and gave us a taste of what it will be like when we are on the floor. I had another instructor that was really big on meds and so in a couple of post conferences he really went into depth about the mechanism of action for common meds. I know your students are higher level, but it seems that most of my classmates are not that strong on their meds and we graduate in a couple of months. I know it helped me a lot to get a better description of how a medication works than what the drug books offer, having this knowledge has helped me on many a test and at clinical. There were times when it was a very slow day at clincal and no one had anything to talk about that day so our instructor would do case senarios with us. He would make us work it out on our own, each student would state what they would do and the next student had to start from where the last student left off. I think our patient died a lot of the time...LOL so bad but it made us think.

Just a few ideas, I don't know how relevant they are for you group though.

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Last semester I took Med Surg 2. The clinical instructor had us research a topic related to our patient's disease. She also did not mind if we research a specific procedure. Every week, a student was chosen to discuss the topic. We had to make copies of the article for each student and write a brieft summary. I had a patient with cirrhosis, so I did mine research on paracentesis since my patient had it done.

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The post conferences I have learned the most from are the ones where the instructor made up a case study that pulled in some of the pieces of clinical scenarios that several of us (students) encountered or may encounter. Then he threw in a twist or two that we didn't expect and asked us to problem solve in a group discussion format by asking leading questions. When we went in the wrong direction with the discussion as we answered his questions, instead of immediately stopping us, he'd throw in the consequences ("Okay, so you did that, and now the patient's ICP is rising. What are you going to do now?") to help us get back on track. He'd also change up the scenario as we all discussed it, to complicate the case in two or three different directions. At different points during the discussion, he'd also take time to review/teach about pathophysiology, procedures/tests, medication interactions/adverse effects, equipment, advocating for the patient, examples of good and crummy documentation, etc. He also looked at the material being emphasized in lecture, trying to pull in applications for the case study. For instance, he might give us the patient's ABGs and have those change as the case progressed.

The socratic style of post conference with group problem solving was always very motivating to me to go out and learn more on my own, to strengthen areas where I was weak, and to see the importance of lecture material to clinical.

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Specializes in Psych..

One of my clinical instructors once assigned us to present to the group different treatments of pain. These ranged from aromatherapy, to pharmacological treatment, to magnet therapy. It was very interesting to learn, in depth, different ways of treating pain. And since almost everyone hospitalized is in some kind of pain...

She also would borrow a student's notes before a big test and make up tons of Jeopardy-type questions. Half of our post conference would be spent playing Jeopardy. Fun!

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Specializes in Acute Mental Health.

Can you possibly include some discussion on how to talk to MD via telephone regarding pts? I've asked new nurses who work in hospital med/surg what they wished they would have learned more about and they all agreed, "Phoning the docs.". I'm going into 4th semester and have never even touched on this subject. I would also like to know how to tell them pertinent info and skip fluff. Hope this helps. Thanks a bunch for asking. :saint:

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Specializes in Family Nurse Practitioner.

2 hours? Wow I am so jealous. We often didn't even get a post conference. When we did we would briefly discuss our cases for the day and I always loved it when we had the time to actually get into some of the things we encountered.

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some things that i've liked in post conference:

- our instructor found people from PT, OT, speech pathology to come talk to us about what they do so that we kind of got an idea of what kinds of consults to ask about or what our pt might be doing during the day when they went out for PT/OT/ST.

- one instructor assigned us all procedures & we had to do a little write up on it, discuss with the other students & make a hand out for everyone

- one instructor went through careplans step by step & helped us improve our writing process & really think about what was priority, etc

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Specializes in long-term-care, LTAC, PCU.

I have to agree with chevyv. I think it would be great to discuss some situations where you would need to call a doctor, and depending on what is going on with the patient, what information you should have ready to tell the doc. For example, a diabetic with a blood sugar of 481. I know i would need what kind of diabetic meds the pt. was on and the dosages, what the pt's. past few blood sugars have been, and also what the current sliding scale of insulin is. This was not something I knew when I first got out of LPN school, and I found out the hard way, irritating the physician whom I was speaking to. You could just do that for a few issues such as chest pain, DM, uncontrolled pain, abnormal lab values, and whatever you have had to call docs about a lot in your career. I think knowing that information would be great for a new grad.

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