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So I just started an accelerated one-year BSN program, and need some talking down off the ledge. Some background: I graduated from a top-tier school undergrad, though my degree was in humanities and I didn't take a single science course. A few years later after working in women's health care (as a counselor and pseudo medical assistant, trained on the job) I decided I wanted to go to nursing school. My plan was/is to get my BSN/RN and then an MPH, to ultimately become a nurse administrator in women's health. I've always been a very good student and I aced all my nursing pre-reqs, which was surprising and uplifting because I never thought I was a "science person" before. Anyway, fast-forward to starting the program (it's been three weeks) and I've never felt like I was in so over my head. I wasn't at all mentally prepared for how hard it was going to be, especially considering it's an accelerated program. I feel like I'm not learning anything because it's just going too fast. I'm completely overwhelmed both academically and clinically (yeah, we already started clinicals too). Despite my clinical experience I'm struggling just as much in the hospital as I am in the classroom - I'm in positions I don't feel trained for; I'm just faking it. Like, I have no idea how to listen to heart and lung and bowel sounds. We did it for about two seconds in lab simulation on a manikin, and now I'm expected (and trusted!) to do it on actual patients?? Clearly I was overconfident before I started. I really, really, really don't want to drop out or fail. I still want to be a nurse so badly and I can't fathom not completing what I started. But I also just don't see how it will be possible. I don't know how to get through the days. Any advice? ETA: I should add that my program is front-loaded, i.e. it's supposed to be overwhelming at the beginning and then the load gets a little lighter. I know my feelings are probably not uncommon, but I haven't really heard my classmates voicing anything like I'm feeling right now. boquiabierta fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Jan 25, 2014 |
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Jan 25, 2014 20:16
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I wanted to post a follow-up from when I put out this distress call back in January:boquiabierta posted:So I just started an accelerated one-year BSN program, and need some talking down off the ledge. I'm still with it and doing SO much better. Thank you so much to all of you who posted words of encouragement and support. The program has been an insane ride, but I'm getting through it, and am on track to graduate in December. Just 2.5 months away! I still definitely have that in-over-my-head feeling, but I've learned that everyone feels that way, and I can't expect to graduate nursing school feeling "ready" and competent as a nurse; that feeling will hopefully just come gradually on the job. I spoke to a nurse who graduated from my program a few years ago, and she said that after six months of working you'll start to feel like maybe you're not going to kill someone today, and after a year you'll feel like a nurse. Honestly, that was one of the most encouraging things I've heard all year! Now I just have to worry about passing my last few classes and then the NCLEX! Thanks again to everyone, this is a great thread. 
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Sep 23, 2014 18:45
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So, where does this group come down on the "new nurses must get med-surg/intensive/acute/hospital experience" question? I've heard that getting that kind of experience sets you up well for future jobs, and I've also heard that it's an outdated sentiment. Personally, I've hated my med-surg rotations and imagine that I would hate intensive care even more. I entered nursing school knowing that I wanted to go into reproductive healthcare/family planning (Planned Parenthood kinda setting). The only place in the hospital I can imagine working would be maternal/newborn. But do I really have to get more generalized experience first before specializing? I can understand the benefits, but really don't want to be miserable for a few years.
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Sep 30, 2014 19:05
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So what's the deal with the nursing honor society (Sigma)? Is it worth anything more than a line on my resume? It's just that it's $90 to join and I'm at the end of school with literally next to no money and no job and about to have to start paying off a bunch of loans... you know? Is it worth it?
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Oct 9, 2014 02:17
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Out of curiosity, why is this thread under BFC, when everything else healthcare-related is under Goon Doctor?
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Nov 1, 2014 23:34
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ha no worries, i have no plan or desire to
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Nov 2, 2014 02:41
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So yesterday I had what I would consider the worst lecture of my nursing school career. The class was med-surg and the subject was HIV/AIDS. Basically the lecture, by an APRN whose specialty is definitely not infectious disease, reproductive/sexual health or anything related, seemed straight out of 1994 plus a footnote about Truvada. Outdated, uninformative, incomplete, biased information topped off with the cherry of not even knowing what AIDS stands for. ("Acquired immunodeficiency virus" was written more than once on the slides. I think understanding that HIV is the virus and AIDS is a SYNDROME caused by the virus - hence the loving S - is a pretty basic and fundamental building block to understanding the disease.) Risk factors were not appropriately explained. Needles were pretty much only discussed in the context of protecting ourselves as healthcare providers, but even that was inadequate - nothing about the importance of not recapping needles, for example (I actually had a needlestick injury from being INSTRUCTED to recap in lab earlier this year, after which they hurriedly changed the policy). She barely even touched on IVDU except to editorialize about how safe needle exchanges, which she only just found out about when she was putting the lecture together, seem like a "double-edged sword" in her opinion. Well, maybe hold back on sharing your uninformed and lovely opinion if you've never even been introduced to the public health concept of harm reduction. ABSTINENCE was promoted. Not in a backwards rural high school whose health curriculum is set by bible-thumping parents. In a highly-ranked, well-respected, accelerated second-degree BSN program. Condoms were barely mentioned, just that they should be used for "insertive sex". Nothing about the relative risks associated with different sexual activities, how anal sex is much higher risk than vaginal which is much higher risk than oral. Barely anything about viral loads. Nothing about how it's possible for HIV+ folks to achieve virtually undetectable viral loads and basically eliminate their transmission risk. Risk reduction measures mentioned did not include pos patients being compliant with treatment. Truvada mentioned only in the context of sero-discordant couples, not as a prophylactic measure for high-risk behavior in general. Gay disease, highest risk community MSM, nothing about the fact that black America has been absolutely ravaged by the disease, nothing about prison populations. We were instructed on the following assessment questions to determine risk: Have you had a blood transfusion, and if so, prior to 1985? (HOW is that a priority question? Or even an appropriate question? Is it even possible to have contracted HIV ~30 years ago and remain undiagnosed and alive?) Do you share drug-using equipment with anyone else? (Not needles or syringes, any drug-using equipment; she specifically mentioned pipes, even though HIV is decidedly not transmitted through saliva.) Have you ever had a sexually transmitted infection? (Like that is not even a useful question. Basically everyone who has sex has been exposed to HPV at some point, most people to HSV1 or 2, and gonorrhea/chlamydia are pretty drat common. Yes, having an ACTIVE infection increases HIV transmission risk, and having a past infection might put you at higher risk of re-exposure, but just asking if you've ever had an STI is so vague and non-specific as to be a pretty useless screening tool in my opinion.) When I worked at Planned Parenthood our screening asked about specific sexual behaviors and IVDU and maybe a few other things. But we basically just recommended rapid HIV testing to everyone anyway. She didn't talk about universal screening at all or the number of people who go undiagnosed. I left that lecture SO ANGRY. It makes me really suspicious of everything else she's taught my class and makes me feel like I should just ignore her slides entirely when I study. It makes me suspicious of what I've been taught in nursing school, period, to be honest.
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Nov 4, 2014 20:50
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Bum the Sad posted:As a whole
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Nov 4, 2014 23:16
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LorneReams posted:I don't know, whenever I hear of a test that had a lot of unusually low scores, what happens is the test is looked at and the questions that had the highest amount of "misses" get looked at closer to make sure the language wasn't intentionally misleading or that had more then one possible solution, or other sorts of issues. There have been a few tests where they just threw out some questions giving people who got them wrong some extra points. Yes, this is exactly what my school does sometimes. Our tests were routinely curved at least a few points.
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Dec 10, 2014 19:13
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Graduated and pinned yesterday edit: oops, way too big, sorry
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Dec 12, 2014 17:36
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Yes. Every semester we'd get like 3 new ATI books. They take up almost entire bookshelf just by themselves.
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Dec 24, 2014 17:37
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Yeah, except that you can never find the exact information to answer the questions you get wrong on the proctored exams and have to do "remediation" for. We complained about that constantly. Like I'd get a question wrong about trach care, for example (like I dunno, when to replace the ties) and the section on trach care I'd be referred to in the book would NEVER include that specific information. And somehow I was supposed to "remediate" on that question by writing two specific "key points to remember" about that topic.
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Dec 24, 2014 20:22
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Just took NCLEX... shut off in 75. Don't feel like I could have failed so flagrantly as to only get 75, so I'm feeling pretty confident. Now to just get a freaking JOB
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Jan 16, 2015 23:03
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Etrips posted:They changed it earlier last year. You have to actually put in legitimate credit card info then submit. You get an actual charge or insufficient funds message = you failed. You get the old message saying "you have already scheduled blah blah blah" = you passed. Yeah, exactly. I had to enter my cc info and hit submit (scary -- it really looked like it was going to charge me!) but then I got an error message saying I already scheduled. I've yet to hear confirmation of this trick from someone who failed, though. NCLEX has a pretty high pass rate (I don't know of any classmates who failed) and I wonder if Pearson's changes last year were meant to address this and if everyone now gets an error message for the first 48 hours after taking the test or something. Anyway, I passed!!
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Jan 19, 2015 20:22
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Half my class had jobs lined up before we even graduated, let alone took NCLEX.
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Jan 31, 2015 23:58
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So, just kinda looking for general reassurance or suggestions. I'm a new grad, three months deep into my first nursing job, a few weeks into my own assignments off orientation. I'm definitely prone to anxiety and overthinking everything, but -- after not really feeling this way during orientation, when I think I took a lot of comfort in the fact of having someone check over my shoulder at every turn -- I'm somewhat taken aback by the feeling of utter dread with which I've been leaving work lately. I'm hoping/assuming it's relatively normal as a new grad to feel this way and it will gradually go away with time, experience, and confidence. I feel mostly okay during the actual shifts -- overwhelmed at times, certainly, and asking for a ton of (hopefully not too much) advice (especially re: when and how aggressive to be in paging MD, etc) from more seasoned nurses. But in general I feel ...okay, and like I'm more or less on top of my poo poo and doing my job at least at a minimally competent level. As soon as I leave work, though, and often for at least the next day or so I can't shake the awful feeling that I must have hosed something up or missed something important, forgot to tell something in report, over- or under-charted this or that, pissed off a fellow nurse, resident, PCA, did something to warrant a pt complaint or coworkers bitching behind my back, whatever else I can fixate irrationally on. Anyway, just hoping this isn't totally crazy or abnormal and that someone might have some words of reassurance and/or advice for getting over this kind of neurotic anxiety. boquiabierta fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 07:16
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Worked with a PCA the other day who overstepped her scope of practice and acted really inappropriately, in my opinion, and I didn't really handle addressing it with her well. I work postpartum, well moms and newborns, and one of my babies had a significant weight loss (>10% since birthweight which is our standard cutoff for notifying the pedi and considering intervention, etc). The thing is plenty of babies, especially those who are exclusively breastfed, WILL hit that 10% mark and we like to freak out about it but it's not necessarily a sign that anything's wrong. It takes 3-5 days for mom's mature milk to come in, so often around day 2-3 baby is starting to wake up more and demand more food, and isn't quite getting satisfied with just a few cc's of colostrum anymore, but isn't going to starve either as long as feedings are going well and mom is feeding on demand to help make her milk come in, etc. The 10% mark CAN indicate ineffective or insufficient nourishment, but there are other factors to consider too, like how much the baby is voiding and stooling, how the latch looks, whether we can hear audible swallowing when the baby feeds, etc. Like everything else, you need to look at the whole picture, not just one data point. Anyway, so the PCA weighed the baby and found that the weight loss had increased from the previous day to over -10%. What she should have done was immediately notify me as the patient's RN. Instead she decided to bring the patient a breast pump and instruct her to increase feeds to Q2H regardless of demand and pump afterwards to supplement. The patient was totally freaked out and called me into her room a little while later; I didn't know anything about this yet so I was immediately confused about why she had a pump, because breastfeeding had been going really well and we don't routinely start patients pumping in the hospital unless there's some issue with breastfeeding. She didn't understand why she'd had this machine shoved on her, was worried about her baby, didn't even know who the PCA was ("I don't know, this girl just brought this here and told me to feed every two hours and pump afterwards and finger feed whatever I get and I don't know what she meant and is my baby okay and ???!!") This put me in an extremely awkward position where I had to work to reassure the pt that her baby was okay and that she didn't need to freak out about feeds and pumping without explicitly undermining another staff member. The PCA intervened exactly the way a different nurse might have, but definitely not the way I would have after working with this patient all day (the PCA had just picked her up at shift change); and either way it's the nurse's call to make! I notified the pediatrician, who agreed with me that it was not something to worry about given that the baby was voiding and stooling appropriately, had good tone and behavior, was latching well at the breast with lots of audible swallowing, etc. When I tried to confront the PCA about it, she didn't even acknowledge that she hadn't informed me of the finding and just reiterated the facts: "10.5% weight loss, told her to feed every two hours and pump afterwards." I tried to explain that the pediatrician and I were not worried about the weight loss and that the patient got really freaked out about what she had said and that I didn't even know about the weight loss when I went into the room. The PCA basically barely acknowledged me. I definitely have an issue with confrontation; this PCA's been working here a lot longer than I have and I guess I have to learn how to exert my authority, because this was NOT OKAY. She didn't have the authority or knowledge to intervene how she did and she caused some not insignificant harm in my view. Blah. Poor communication and team work is hard to deal with whether I'm in the position of authority or not. tl;dr a PCA working with me overstepped her scope of practice, didn't inform me of important findings, caused a bad situation, and refused to acknowledge that she had done anything inappropriate when I tried to talk to her about it. boquiabierta fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Nov 1, 2015 |
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Nov 1, 2015 18:09
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Dumb question. How bad do you guys think it is to cry in front of your coworkers/bosses, for reasons mainly having to do with anxiety and being too thin-skinned and being well aware of these issues but being unable to stop their onslaught from manifesting in the most humiliating, unstoppable of ways? I know I didn't do anything wrong, no one is saying I did anything wrong, everyone is saying I'm a good nurse, but essentially I got yelled at by a doctor for a stupid reason and I know this kind of thing happens all the time and I just couldn't stop crying. It wasn't even a terrible situation by any stretch but I just couldn't keep my face together and now I feel humiliated and like everyone must think I can't handle the job.
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Dec 8, 2015 20:05
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Thanks y'all. I feel like from your reactions I overblew the story a little -- it's resolved; the dr actually apologized to me later, which I know is an exceedingly rare thing indeed. The bosses know what happened and were concerned and interested to know how I was treated and to ensure the situation was resolved. So I don't think there's anything to actually do; I was just really, really embarrassed to have cried in front of coworkers including my bosses when they brought it up with me the next day. I guess I have to get over it and work on developing my thicker skin in the future.
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Dec 10, 2015 09:26
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I like Cherokee bottoms, Greys tops.
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Jan 10, 2016 22:35
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I survived a twelve month program two years ago. It was doable but it was definitely hell especially at first when I had no idea what was going on. Best advice is to be organized and make friends who can be your study group and support system. Good luck!
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Jun 30, 2016 17:55
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boquiabierta fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Nov 19, 2018 |
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Nov 17, 2018 18:27
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Yeah that was the culture at my hospital too. Tons of nurses would routinely look up their patients for 15+ minutes without getting paid for it. Sucks.
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Mar 9, 2020 06:12
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Any thoughts on remote nursing jobs? I'm an RN in the U.S. but I currently live in Spain, and the process to get my nursing license co-validated over here is a loving nightmare and I'm pretty sure they'll reject me anyway (they don't seem to understand that my accelerated nursing program truly was equivalent to a four-year BSN, and only see the time I was actually in school). So I'm thinking about other options like trying to do some remote nursing job, but I don't know what those entail -- dealing with insurance and care management, mostly, I assume? If anyone has knowledge I'd appreciate hearing any perspectives at all.blue squares posted:What would be the fastest way to go from a BA in writing to working as a nurse? My only science classes are in astronomy and one in marine sciences I had a BA in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and took not a single STEM class in my first degree. It took me about two years to do all the nursing pre-reqs at a community college, then I applied to a one-year accelerated BSN program designed for people who already had degrees. Honestly it was too short. I don't think an accelerated program should be less than 18 months. They prepared us to take NCLEX and that was about all. So, with pre-reqs plus program I'd say you're looking at a good 3-4 years. boquiabierta fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 21, 2020 17:03
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Anyone have experience with remote nursing jobs? I'm licensed in Ohio but I live in Spain, and am trying to get my license recognized over here, but it's a big bureaucratic nightmare and in the meantime I need to make some money. I have no idea what to expect with remote nursing jobs and if they'd even be possible with the time difference. Looking for any thoughts/suggestions/advice. Thanks in advance
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Feb 18, 2021 10:37
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drat guess I really killed it huh
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Feb 25, 2021 10:03
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Has anyone here done an online MSN?
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Aug 4, 2021 12:37
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Yeah, I got one of my preceptors a box of mixed teas because she was really into tea. The other one I had no idea what to get so I just got her a box of chocolates.
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Aug 11, 2021 08:08
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Applying to grad school for a masters in Nurse Leadership and they require three essays. One is "why school X". (The truthful answer is because I went there for nursing and it seems like it will be easy to use the few grad credits I have and I don't feel like researching other schools, and this is a somewhat last-minute decision and I'm lazy. But I know how to bullshit.) The other two essay prompts are: quote:What are your career interests and goals? Address your reasons for pursuing advanced practice nursing, your reason for selecting the specialty track (if applicable), and your goals upon graduation. and quote:Why have you decided to pursue this degree? What are your plans for the future? HOW ARE THEY NOT THE EXACT SAME QUESTION. I asked in my informational interview, very gingerly, if they could please clarify what they were looking for with each essay. The program director was like "huh, they are very similar, isn't that funny. No one's ever mentioned that before! Uh, do your best." Someone who's good at playing these games tell me how to write two essays saying the same thing. I've been staring at my google docs trying to figure out a distinct approach to take for each essay and I cannot loving figure it out for the life of me. xposting
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Mar 16, 2022 11:17
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Fun Times! posted:Your reason for pursuing advanced practice is to contribute to the profession. Are you a minority or somehow disadvantaged? This is your sob story essay, too. Ravenfood posted:Make the first specifically about your professional goals (what you hope to do with the degree, fairly narrowly focused) and make the other more about broader life goals like a story about why you find doing X actually important, or why this represents something important about nursing. Thank you both!
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Mar 17, 2022 15:45
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The Radonda Vaught verdict is terrifying. Yes, she made an egregious error, and it should've been handled by the board of nursing, not the criminal justice system. This does not make me want to return to bedside nursing. What the actual gently caress.
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Mar 26, 2022 09:17
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I hadn’t even heard that part. That’s so hosed up. It’s almost like the powers that be aren’t actually interested in best practices for improving safety and patient outcomes.
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Mar 26, 2022 12:35
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We needed two nurses even for a straight cath as a CAUTI prevention measure 
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Apr 6, 2022 08:24
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Our two-nurse presence requirement for Foleys and straight caths was to ensure sterility was maintained. I didn't mind it, in case I missed with the first attempt and needed someone to go get me another cath. Of course I learned quick to grab two to start. But we had a whole checklist that needed to be filled out and signed by both nurses attesting to sterile technique.
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Apr 7, 2022 08:32
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e: never mind
boquiabierta fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Feb 19, 2024 |
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Feb 19, 2024 16:51
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 10:19 |
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Any advice for finding an online nursing refresher course?
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Mar 26, 2024 12:01
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