Nursing Student Clinical Placement

1. Nursing Student Clinical Placement

2. Nursing Student Clinical Placement: Expectations And Planning As a practice-based profession, clinical placement is key for nursing students. It is the arena that enables them to apply the knowledge gained during classes; it is how key skills and competencies are developed by doing hands-on work, and how students can begin to experience the intricacies and the environment of their future workplace. It allows them to be better prepared for the moment when they enter the health care field and begin working with patients, doctors and other nurses. Nurses play a central role in the overall provision of care. This does not end with the administration of medication and treatments; it goes beyond that into being appropriately equipped to offer emotional support, education and counselling to patients and families, and simultaneously being able to effectively work side by side with other health care professional to achieve desired outcomes.

3. Effective clinical placements for nursing students should take place within a variety of settings and should also allow the future nurse to: • Discover the variety of learning opportunities available in health care environments • Work under high-pressure and challenging frames that require fast and informed decision making many times • Get acquainted with the dynamics of the job • Learning efficient time management and prioritization • Developing a solution-oriented mindset • Working and learning from patients just as much as other medical colleagues It should be the goal of any valuable clinical placement program to allow students to have a diversity of experiences across primary care settings and ultimately, building momentum towards successful certification exams and the beginning of their professional careers.

4. • For students, their first clinical placement is an exciting time. It’s a milestone signalling that things are finally becoming real and they are moving from notebooks to patient charts. Preparation is essential in making sure the experience lends itself to as much learning as possible. One of the main things to be noted is that in health care settings, flexibility is king. Being able to move shifts around and deal with unexpected schedule changes are going to be important, especially if the student wishes to practice side by side with a mentor whose schedule is always subject to change. • Many will find juggling school, clinical placement and social life overwhelming. Here is where organization skills will have to kick in. Luckily, technology has solutions to help ease the burden. For example, a cloud-based student nurse scheduling solution such as the one provided by Rotation Manager can take some of the pressure off by helping keep track of patient records, schedules, background checks and drug screenings and even getting job references. • The beginning of a clinical placement program will always be an exciting yet an intense time, especially when working in units where the full spectrum of medical conditions is present from day one. Regardless of this, working in health care is one of the most rewarding careers and with every patient helped, the motivation to do more and better will only increase.

5. 3 Tips For Winning The Final Step Of Student Nursing Life • For nurse students, the culmination of all their efforts, learnings, experiences, trainings and even failures and quite frankly their future careers rest on one final step: the management placement. While the most overconfident of students will feel it is a done deal, practicing caution and assertiveness can make a huge difference. While it’s important to take a step back and congratulate yourself for reaching this final stage, now is not the time to lay low and take it easy – there’s one more final push of student life required. • However, at this point the majority of students should feel more comfortable walking in an extra busy ward, dealing with difficult patients and cases, administering medicines and treatments and managing a schedule that can change in a heartbeat. While the planning and organizing should get easier at this stage, the reality is it never does, so being adaptable, flexible and responsive will always be valuable to any future nurse.

6. As final exams, certifications and the thrilling job seek all begin unravelling, a couple of useful tips can make this final push, a smooth ride. • Be prepared, do some research Every placement will be different and require different aptitudes and attitudes. The basic skills and learning’s will always be valuable, but preparation will be key from day one. A pre-placement visit is always a good idea. Getting a head start and going in for a visit to meet the mentor and future colleagues, asking questions and getting useful pre-reads and even getting familiar with the setting itself with calm some of the nerves and ensure a smoother start.

7. Creating SMART objectives One of the best ways to make sure goals are set right is to think about them as Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Take for instance, a student nurse who aims to be able to administer treatments without supervision by following appropriate procedures and providing sufficient information to patients is a smart goal which can be measured in a period of 3 months or so and proven by the number of patients who in that timeframe have received information about the drugs they have been given and why, and as well through the documentation available that resulted from that. Goals should not be any more than five to ensure success. Thorough and thoughtful planning By now, every single nurse student must be aware of the importance of planning. Managing time and patient load on top of other responsibilities is not the easiest thing to do, but is a skill to master. As best practice, it’s important to start off small with a couple of patients and learning their file to their fully. As time goes by, the same can be applied with an increasing number of patients. Getting a planner such as Rotation Manager can help centralize important documents, access shift and patient information easily, order checks and drug screenings, all from a phone. Lastly, the most important thing to understand is that for every mistake, there is a lesson learned and it’s always helpful to take a moment and self-congratulate for the progress made so far.

8. Track Rotation and Meet Standards with Rotation Manager • Among the most challenging tasks that nursing schools and hospitals come up against on a regular basis is scheduling the rotations for their nursing students. • It’s a crucial task because any scheduling errors can create a whole series of problems like failing to adequately cover the care of patients, damaging a hospital’s reputation for standards, giving the nursing students too few hours, as well as a host of other potential complications for nursing schools. • This is where Rotation Manager (https://rotationmanager.com/) can help. It is a solution for scheduling nurse rotations that is cloud-based so requires no installation, but offers significant benefits for every person and institution involved in the process of drawing up a rotation schedule.

9. It offers all that is required for setting clinical rotations including: • • The ability to track rotations • Ensuring requirements are met on time • Enabling schedules and hours to be uploaded from mobile devices • The ordering of background checks • The ordering of drug screenings • Getting job references. Rotation Manager is not only user-friendly but it also includes a mobile web-app that enables nursing students to access information about their instructors, shifts, and other relevant data from their mobile devices. Students are also able to request that they are referred for jobs by their hospital educators to hospital HR departments where their rotations are taking place. An online clinical journal is among the benefits for nursing students. It enables them to make notes about their clinical experiences and allows them to give feedback to their instructors. In addition, it’s possible for them to request and store in a built-in vault any electronic letters of recommendation from their instructors.

10. • Rotation Manager makes the challenge of scheduling rotations much easier and a lot more efficient. By utilizing Rotation Manager’s functionality is among the easiest ways of preventing any compromised compliance standards and eliminating inefficient rotation scheduling. • Rotation Manager offers many benefits to Nursing Students, Hospitals, and Schools and has helped many nursing programs significantly reduce the paperwork that previously added to their problems. It has played a big part in helping eliminate audit failure. • By securely centralizing documents in a protected location accessible to all parties makes it much easier to track all of the important documentation needed at each step of the process. • Those hospitals and schools that have been using the Rotation Manager software agree that affiliations between all parties involved in scheduling rotations have been greatly strengthened.