Yay! First Semester is over!!

pitaya · Dec 4, 2010

Congrats! I'm interested in the structure of your program. Will this be your first time in the clinical setting? You said it's for 2 weeks, so is that ten days of clinical? Will you have to do care plans? I'm curious because my program has clinicals throughout the semester. After finals, we've already done about ten days of clinical for each class. But I've always thought that it might be easier to have nothing but classes to concentrate on and then have nothing but clinicals at the end of the semester. Going to 3 clinical days a week and having 3 classes that meet twice a week has been stressful for me. I'm in my second semester and I don't like this kind of multi-tasking! I'd also rather have a block schedule where we just have one class at a time for a month and then move on to the next one, but I digress. :) It's not about me. Just wondering about how other schools are set up!

colta · Dec 4, 2010

Well, as far as this semester goes we were slammed with courses. We had six different classes a week, 8:30am to 4pm, plus lab... where we went over all the skills necessary for our clinical. So, I guess they just decided to lump our clinical all into one. We have two weeks where we're in the hospital/nursing home setting every week day. We're going to be there from 7-3, so five, 8 hour shifts a week. It's going to be my first time in the clinical setting and my first time really working in the clinical environment... I've been a patient plenty of times, but never the care giver!

The nursing home I'm going to is a fairly large facility and I'm really nervous, I hope I do well!

As far as care plans go, we were pretty lucky. We don't have to do up care plans, but we do get patient assignments and have to be aware of everything going on with our patient, including dx, tx, meds and all that good stuff. We haven't really gone over the whole process of making a care plan... we've done one, but I think the raeson for that is because of how my class is setup.

My class is also a LPN student/PSW (personal support worker) mix... so there is about 16 lpn students and 20 PSW students. Next semester we are doing another week or two week long grouping of clinicals and then when we split up from the PSW students in April, we have another two week clinical block in the hospital. It's really great how they've set it up in my opinion... having classes and clinical at the same time would completely mess me up! Especially with 6 courses. :uhoh3: ... That was actually part of the reason our instructors decided to hold our final exams before clinical... so we could be able to retain the information and do well on them. But that all being said, next semester, our skills work is done without the PSW's so we'll be learning much more advanced skills. (catheters, wound care/dressings, IV's, med pass, etc)

But yeah, that's my course . From what I've read on here it does seem a bit different or unconvential from most schools. Thanks for asking about!

wannabmidwife · Dec 4, 2010

Super happy for you!! I'll hopefully be saying the same come May. :yeah: