nursejen77

If you meet your patient before you prepare for clinical it may help. Take 5 minutes with your patient. Get an idea of the neuro status and functioning. Develop a little bit of a relationship with the patient. When I was in school we had to go the night before our clinical to pick our patient, we werent allowed to touch the patient w/out our instructor in the building, but talking was allowed. It will help you to put a face to the patient while you are preparing and you will remember more. Patients in general are very lonely and love to have someone talk to them for a few minutes, 5 minutes can feel like an hour to them. You can get so much objective information, and subjective just from this interaction that it is amazing. My problem in nursing school was that I didn't have a decent "report sheet" I tried to make them myself but had no luck, ask your precepting nurses for a copy of what report sheet they use and it will help you to put the processes in a systematic order to help you remember things. I have been out of school for a year and a half and still have problems with giving report- take a systematic approach and it seems to work best for me. Good luck, stick in there. Ask any nurse, we all have horror stories from Nursing School and we made it through.