What are they teaching?

[egglady]

I have an honest question. I'm not being a old crabby nurse. Honest question here... What are nursing schools teaching? So many posts of new grads that didn't think nursing would be stressful or hard. Nursing is a very stressful job. Are these schools actually teaching our future nurses that nursing is Not a stressful job? If so, they are doing a disservice to our profession. I feel bad for these new nurses that seem to truly be shocked that it is a stressful profession.

[JKL33]

11 hours ago, bitter_betsy said:

I feel that I have a pretty good educational basis from which to build upon, but I am pretty terrified of making a documentation mistake almost to the point that I don't even want to do this anymore.

It'll be okay.

The lawyers would have you coming and going if given a chance. Keep the few useful nuggets they might have shared and let the rest go. Don't let it terrify you. Document the care you render - assessments, interventions, evaluations/reassessments, and important communications with others. I generally do document as if I might have to answer for the care I provided, but many people take that to mean simply write more....which is not what is needed. Instead, focus on being concise and briefly conveying the situation in clear and accurate terms.

The purpose of the chart is to serve as an accurate record of the patient's care, and while people love to talk about how it can make or break you and/or "save your butt," the best thing you can do is take good care of the patient. That is priority #1.

Understand that a lot of the charting particulars at any given place have to do with making data extraction easier, initiatives, billing, etc. While these things are important, they are not as important as providing proper nursing care to the patient.

[londonflo]

4 minutes ago, JKL33 said:

the best thing you can do is take good care of the patient. That is priority #1.

Best piece of wisdom I have heard all day (I listened to too much politics!)

[Hoosier_RN, MSN]

1 hour ago, londonflo said:

Best piece of wisdom I have heard all day (I listened to too much politics!)

The politics on here, and elsewhere, are a huge turnoff. I'm ready for the elections to be over and done with so I can get back to some semblance of near normal. I know many others who feel the same

[Nurse with the Purse]

I may be wrong....but I blame alot on Social Media. The images posted by new, younger nurses give an inaccurate description of nursing.I see plenty of post from young nurses on the job looking glamorous with their RN badge placed to be noticed with captions such as " Just finished saving lives".

I often wondered.."Where do they work?". I'm not an overachiever, but I go beyond my duties and leave my shift tired, sweaty and hair definitely not looking like it did when I walked in! Certainly not the glam looks I see posted by these young/newer nurses after a long shift.

[Nursemomof4]

I think what you’re seeing is anxiety, OP. I knew full well how stressful nursing would be. My mom was a nurse for the DOC and my husband was an ER nurse when I was in nursing school. I knew about the schedule, the understaffing, the stress. I was sure I could handle it and it would all be worth it. My nursing instructors were scary, they didn’t give me any unrealistic expectations. I just couldn’t have known that inpatient nursing would give me panic attacks, crippling anxiety, and depression.
I’m not sure how long you’ve been a nurse but you may be noticing more of this because 1) the internet is telling you about it 2) it’s become more and more socially acceptable to be open about mental health issues and/or 3) nursing has changed, and in many specialties it is quite literally impossible to do everything that we’re expected to do in 1 shift. New grads don’t know what corners are OK to cut.

Anyway, that was my experience as a new grad in a SNF and in the hospital setting. Lateral violence was no help either. I’m a visiting nurse now and I’m so much happier doing outpatient nursing!

[Katie82, RN]

On 8/20/2020 at 2:12 PM, llg said:

I'm with macawake, MSN. It's much easier to teach a new grad a few technical skills she might have missed in school than to try to teach someone about the high level conceptual thinking, data analysis, research processes, etc. who was never exposed to that in school.

I never found that I needed conceptual thinking, data analysis and research process at the bedside. I engaged all that after I left the hospital.

[londonflo]

32 minutes ago, Katie82 said:

I never found that I needed conceptual thinking, data analysis and research process at the bedside. I engaged all that after I left the hospital.

I am glad that you realized you needed to go to a different practice setting to engage in these higher level skills. Conceptual thinking and data analysis is the essence of nursing practice. Perhaps obtaining your MBA has helped you reacquaint yourself with those skills. Glad you have found your home!

[Katie82, RN]

4 minutes ago, londonflo said:

I am glad that you realized you needed to go to a different practice setting to engage in these higher level skills. Conceptual thinking and data analysis is the essence of nursing practice. Perhaps obtaining your MBA has helped you reacquaint yourself with those skills. Glad you have found your home!

Sadly, I never found a need for APA style. Perfect for research or academia, but never found much need for it elsewhere. What a pain, but I became very good at it in school. Just never found a need to communicate in third person in my "real world" jobs.

[londonflo]

8 minutes ago, Katie82 said:

Sadly, I never found a need for APA style

A curriculum Is not set up in the expectation that everything that is taught will be utilized by every student in the practice of the discipline. In terms of nursing, my college (and many others) taught me how to calculate a pediatric medication dosage by Young's rule. Yeh I'm that old! But my takeaway (since I have never worked in pediatrics) was that pediatric dosages need to be calculated in terms of weight, or age (Fried's rule) or may be organ dysfunction like renal failure and this is important and vital. And if I had decided pediatrics was my calling (in the late 70s) I would have needed that information. In the US our nursing education must have content on the following practice areas: medical, surgical, psychiatric, maternity, pediatrics and community health basics. Other countries have nursing programs that require a nurse to choose a specific practice area as their focus.

Sometimes I have heard angry nurses say to someone they are having a disagreement with on a fact, I have forgotten more than you will ever know! Such an odd statement - is it a compliment or an insult?

[JKL33]

1 hour ago, Katie82 said:

I never found that I needed conceptual thinking, data analysis and research process at the bedside. I engaged all that after I left the hospital.

Not the kind of thing that is being referred to, anyway, that's for sure. There are typically a few committees in which bedside staff may participate; these are given agendas on which to work. The problems they are allowed to work on are either low-level or someone else's idea of problems and, often enough, already-dictated solutions. Other than that, if you're at the bedside your directive is to perform whatever initiatives are in play.

Bedside nursing isn't a few skills. It's a lot of skills, plenty of which are not manual. Sometimes it seems like the fact that any (manual) skills are involved offends some people or isn't the proper highbrow sort of activity with which the nursing profession wishes to associate itself.

There is a disconnect here and pretending that bedside nurses don't need to learn "skills" as much as things that are not part of every nurse's daily routine of managing a patient load is [? I don't know what]....odd, to say the least. It's very much like pretending that this part of nursing isn't nursing. Is that what we're saying?

[londonflo]

1 hour ago, Katie82 said:

Sadly, I never found a need for APA style. Perfect for research or academia, but never found much need for it elsewhere. What a pain, but I became very good at it in school. Just never found a need to communicate in third person in my "real world" jobs.

I missed your last sentence the first time I read your post. APA is not communicating in the third person. It is acknowledging your work is building off the research and thoughts of others. It is giving credit to the original source while adding your own ideas. Using others' work or ideas and claiming it as your own shows a lack of integrity. Also citing references allows the reader to find the primary source and develop their own impressions of the writer's thoughts.

May be you could give me an example of how APA is communicating in the third person?

[Guest 1152923]

11 hours ago, Katie82 said:

Sadly, I never found a need for APA style. Perfect for research or academia, but never found much need for it elsewhere. What a pain, but I became very good at it in school. Just never found a need to communicate in third person in my "real world" jobs.

This^^^ APA-a complete waste of time for most bedside nurses not wishing to pursue further education. If only the time spent learning this nonsense was instead devoted to subjects that would actually enhance existing clinical knowledge/skills-ie: advanced pharmacology, higher level anatomy and physiology, healthcare delivery systems......