Clinicals

Since I'm in an accelerated program, my first clinicals took place this last semester. We had 5 weeks of clinical in the lab at school and then 3 weeks in the hospital (twice a week). Mostly the stuff at the lab was pretty boring, but we did learn how to do all the basic skills: bed baths, changing an occupied bed, vital signs, ROM, assessments, giving meds (not IV or IM), etc.

The check off's were nerve wracking... but I passed them all. I know that you have to learn the things somehow, but it seemed like things were so different in the hospital that I'm not sure how useful it all was.  There's only certain things you can learn by pretending to do them on a fake patient..

My clinicals were on a general med-surg floor that also included some renal and trauma patients. Overall most of the nurses that I interacted with were really nice. Some of them were more willing than others to teach, let us in on cool procedures and take the time to help us out. The most recent graduates seemed to be the most willing to help us out and teach us, since they were just in school not that long ago. Mostly the nurses were grateful to have another set of hands, since we were basically the ones taking care of our one patient.

It seemed to me that clinicals (for fundamentals at least) pretty much consist of getting your feet wet, getting used to going into patient's rooms and talking to them. You try to see what else is going on on the floor to see if there's something interesting to see, but otherwise you feel like you're in your patient's room or stuck in the hall trying to find something to occupy yourself. The worst was that there was literally no place we could go that was out of the way, where we could sit or chart if we had free time. This was sort of okay for a 5 hour clinical but it may kill me when we start 12 hour clinicals the second 8 weeks of the spring semester. Ugh.

Procedures accomplished

- Bed baths. Managed to get lucky on my first two patients and they were ambulating and didn't need help bathing, but I helped a fellow student with a bed bath on her patient the second week and that was just plain tiring because the woman basically couldn't help  us at all. My third week I had a partial paralysis guy who didn't do much of anything for himself so I had to give him two full bed baths, luckily with help from fellow students. He was also a complete gem in the fact that he was so out of it. I couldn't figure out if he had dementia (he was being treated for it), was trying to be funny, or was just that inappropriate. Whatever the reason, he was a challenging patient.

- Flushed an NG tube on a patient

- Passed oral and transdermal patch meds to my patient the last week. Not super hard... but I got to use the Pyxis so I guess that was exciting

- Sort of assisted my instructor with an ostomy. We didn't put the new one on because the ostomy nurse was called for it.

- Vital signs twice a day on each of my patients.


Procedures witnessed

- Nurse pulled a foley catheter on a woman after I got to deflate the balloon.

- Watched the nurse give IV and IM meds, give meds in the NG tube

- Watched my instructor empty a J-P drain.

- Changing out an ostomy which the ostomy nurse did (after my patient's ostomy bag exploded all over the floor while I was with her. Twice. Have I mentioned I'm a figurative and literal shit magnet?)

Care plans

Yup, they suck. They're an epic waste of time in my opinion. But they're apparently a necessary evil in nursing school and perhaps after. The hospital we're at actually has nurses doing a sort of care plan for their patients. Really they're just stating nursing goals and interventions and that stuff...

Care plans are just time consuming and boring. But whatever, they must be done and so I do them.