this morning after giving report, i was walking towards the lounge and noticed a call light on. i go in there, and ask the mom "may i help you with something?" and she and the bsn nursing student answer "the iv is beeping"
so i go and look at it, and the student mentions to me "the iv bag is empty" so i said "ok no problem" and i go to the iv pump to go and put in the new bag next to it. then the student says "oh, i was gonna do it"
so i said it was ok, i would be there to watch him do it.
he took the bag, and looked at it, like as if he's never seen an empty ivf bag before...... and i said "ok, i do it like this..." showing him how to do it, and he asked me "wont the fluid come out (of the chamber)?" and i said "no, it won't it's ok".... then he did it the way i showed him.
and i think to myself that this is a bsn student, and they have already done medsurg before and he didn't even know how to spike a new iv bag.
i was spiking iv bags, priming, giving piggyback megs, flushing iv's the first semester of nursing school. and mind you, i went thru an asn program.
i don't understand why a bsn student from a state school would not know how to do this by the peds semester.
anyways, i heard their instructor telling the charge nurse "the students are doing everything but meds"
so back to the student, isn't spiking an iv a skill that they should know by the peds semester?
btw that school-bsn- has a 78% pass rate on nclex-rn exam, and my school has a 98%-asn-)
in my school we learned the skill in class, at the nursing lab in my community college.
but after reading sooooooo many responses, it seems that a lot of schools don't teach that at school, and apparently the students in a lot of schools are left to learn all the basic nursing skills on their own.
:twocents:In my ASN program we weren't allowed to hang IV meds until our last semester and then we had a lab that taught us how to program the pumps, primary/secondary lines, etc., but interestingly enough, these were already set up with the bags already spiked in the lab setting and priming lines/spiking were never discussed and I never thought about it until I was actually at the bedside with an RN one day ready to hang a piggyback. She asked me if I knew how to do it and I told her yes, hung the minibag up, pulled off the cap and watched as the whole bag of abx promptly poured onto the floor:confused:. Nurse just sighed and said "I'll call pharmacy and get another bag." It was THEN I understood that some bags could be spiked upside down and some couldn't:imbar. Have never made that mistake again:lol2:
:twocents:In my ASN program we weren't allowed to hang IV meds until our last semester and then we had a lab that taught us how to program the pumps, primary/secondary lines, etc., but interestingly enough, these were already set up with the bags already spiked in the lab setting and priming lines/spiking were never discussed and I never thought about it until I was actually at the bedside with an RN one day ready to hang a piggyback. She asked me if I knew how to do it and I told her yes, hung the minibag up, pulled off the cap and watched as the whole bag of abx promptly poured onto the floor:confused:. Nurse just sighed and said "I'll call pharmacy and get another bag." It was THEN I understood that some bags could be spiked upside down and some couldn't:imbar. Have never made that mistake again:lol2:
at my school we had "pretend" bags.... meaning that they were reusable bags, so we learn how to spike and prime our IV's with tap water!
so I never did anything without doing the bag upside down!
at my school we had "pretend" bags.... meaning that they were reusable bags, so we learn how to spike and prime our IV's with tap water!
Longie
19 Posts
:twocents:In my ASN program we weren't allowed to hang IV meds until our last semester and then we had a lab that taught us how to program the pumps, primary/secondary lines, etc., but interestingly enough, these were already set up with the bags already spiked in the lab setting and priming lines/spiking were never discussed and I never thought about it until I was actually at the bedside with an RN one day ready to hang a piggyback. She asked me if I knew how to do it and I told her yes, hung the minibag up, pulled off the cap and watched as the whole bag of abx promptly poured onto the floor:confused:. Nurse just sighed and said "I'll call pharmacy and get another bag." It was THEN I understood that some bags could be spiked upside down and some couldn't:imbar. Have never made that mistake again:lol2: