RNs and up - Do you really use all of the "gen-ed" course material on the job?

[RomaniGypsy]

I just finished taking another A&P 1 exam, and I just have to ask - do y'all really use all of this stuff on the job? Do you really need to know the difference between a tuberosity and a tubercle, or the names of all of the cranial nerves, or what muscles get innervated by what spinal nerves, or the names and locations of the individual bones in the wrist, etc, etc, etc?

Or, for that matter, do you really need to know about all of the philosophers they teach you about in Ethics, or how to do a 2-way ANOVA (Statistics), or what Lev Vygotsky did with his life (Psychology)? Do y'all use _any_ of this stuff "on the job"?

It strikes me that these classes are a lot like throwing a large amount of mud at a wall and hoping some will stick. I'll remember a few things from each, but I can't promise to remember which indentations are called "fossae" and which bear the name "ala".

I intend no disrespect to LPNs/LVNs when I say "RNs and up", but an LPN I know said that what LPNs and RNs really need to know on account of what they do on the job is distinctly varied. Another student in my A&P 1 class said, today after the exam, that her mom is an LPN and she doesn't even know the nine abdominal regions that we learned about in the first week of class. (My takeaway is that she, and at least the other LPNs with whom she works in that facility, don't need to know even this basic A&P information in order to do their jobs successfully.) With this information in mind, I want to see if what I hear from RNs, NPs, and other "specialty nurses" is substantially different.

I've worn a couple of different career hats in my life and I know that in both cases, I didn't use a lot of what I learned on the road toward being fully qualified to "do" that career. I'm still at a solid "A" in A&P 1 with only one exam to go, but part of me is disenchanted with the whole process because I feel like I'm rote-memorizing a whole bunch of stuff I will never again use after regurgitating it for the exams... and that would be naught but a waste of my time.

[kbrn2002, ADN, RN]

On 4/22/2019 at 5:14 PM, Oldmahubbard said:

We did petri dishes for various conditions, came back a week later. I learned that even thoroughly washed hands are still very germy. Almost as germy as the doorknob.

I don't say there is zero point in hand washing, but there was a small lesson in it.

Otherwise that course was a complete waste of time.

Part of the reason is that so few people today die from infections, unless they have underlying conditions.

I felt that Micro spent way, way too much time emphasizing infectious disease, which is not what 99% of my nursing career has been like over 30 years.

The micro thing, yep. That I will agree with. We had to compile a "bug book" which in the days before readily available online resources were around was one giant PITA! Had to memorize a crap ton of information about infectious diseases that I never have and can pretty confidently say I never will encounter. On the plus side, I found the class rather fascinating even though as far as the nursing curriculum goes it is definitely the information I used the least in real world nursing. But then I didn't go into infectious disease as a specialty, I am sure there are nurses out there somewhere that use that information every day in their jobs.