Previous Clinicals did not prepare you?

smiles710 · Sep 13, 2018

Yes, I feel the same way. I just started my first semester of med surg 1, and I feel unbelievably unprepared. My past clinical instructors have been great and supportive, but I feel like I didn't really learn anything important. All we did was bed baths and changing sheets. Its a definite adjustment. They have very high expectations for us and it feels very sudden. My clinical instructor now is very understanding because I'm not the only one in my rotation struggling. I think once I get more comfortable with the pace and workload it'll be better, but right now its a lot.

Miss.LeoRN · Sep 13, 2018

My final semester in nursing school, my clinical instructor basically had us playing CNA all through clinical, all semester. Now, I get the importance of understanding that basic care is part of nursing care. I am never above washing, bathing, cleaning, and assisting a patient onto a bed pan simply because I am a nurse. However, as a 4th semester student about to graduate... we should have been doing a lot more than simply that. We did little to no nursing care except for when we rotated out to our chosen "specialty" units which was one day every couple weeks (a total of 4). Occasionally one of us would get to pass meds. If one of our patients were having anything done, procedures, tests, anything... and we wanted to help or witness it, we had to be done with all our AM care for all our patients (typically 4) before we could. I was actually pulled away by a CNA from a patient in respiratory distress and who was being put on bipap, actively being shown how the machine worked and functioned by the resp. therapist who threatened to "tell my clinical instructor I was neglecting my patient" because one patient's breakfast tray arrived early and she was a standby assist. Yeah. We had 12 hours clinicals at this point. She wanted us there at 5am even though we were supposed to be there at 6 so that we could look up our patients. We were docked "points" if we weren't there at 5. Come 1130 we'd break for lunch, and come 1230 when we returned to the floor it was paperwork until 6pm when she'd let us leave. We had to have full care plans with disease process summaries for each patient and we have to fill out a "medication report sheet" for each med they were on.

Unfortunately for us, we didn't know any better, so we said nothing. By the time we were sitting in lecture one day, towards the end of the program, and the Professor went "now, you should be familiar with this from clinical" and me and my whole group went.. uhhh... no? It was really too late. The professor, who was one of the people who design our program, spoke to us after class and was livid, absolutely livid about how our clinical was being handled. At this point in time it was the second to last week of clinicals. I am pretty sure they never hired that adjunct again, however.

I know a lot of clinical experience varies on your instructor, the nurse your shadowing, and the availability of patients at any given time. I mean you're never going to be able to put in a Foley if there are no patients that require one, or a nurse isn't comfortable allowing you to try. You're not gonna assist with a wound vac if you're never on a floor that has patients who may need one. And no matter what you do experience, none of it is going to prepare you for your first time on the floor as a new orientee or RN. Even when I finally was an RN in the hospital, finding me the things I needed to see while on orientation to help me be familiar off orientation was near impossible! I'd come in the next day and everyone was like "Oh man! You should have been here yesterday, we had this and this and that" and my day would be calm as anything. Now that I am on my own, I am getting all the things I didn't before like... seriously -.-.

All in all, if you're concerned, take it to someone in your program. Talk to them about your concerns. I really really with one of us in my class that final semester had. We talked about it. Especially when we learned other groups were doing far, far, far more than we were.

WanderingWilder, ASN · Sep 13, 2018

Yes going from semester 2 to semester 3 was a culture shock. The expectation at the end of 2 was no where near where we were expected to be at the beginning of 3.