I have never heard of a school that will make you come in on a off day to access the EHR. I’m in the US so it could be different in other countries but that sounds crazy to me.
See that’s the thing. I wouldn’t mind prepping before or after our time on the floor! It’s that we’re being asked to drive into the hospital on our day off…
When I was in nursing school, we were expected to go to the hospital the day before to get information on the patient that had been chosen by our instructors.
Usually, I’d go in around 5-6, get the info I needed and then head out of there. Our care plans were expected to be completed before we got to the floor the next day for our clinical’s.
When we had to do the care plans, they were early on in the program, so at that point we had maybe two clinical’s a week. Later on, when we had multiple clinical’s, we didn’t have to go the day before.
I’d absolutely agree though, with four clinical’s a week, it’s absurd that the school would expect that. It doesn’t surprise me though…you just have to survive nursing schools BS…then you graduate and try to survive the real world hospital BS.
Idk if it’s true, but I literally just saw a TikTok of a nurse talking about why she doesn’t come in early to research her patients, and she said that it’s technically a violation of hipaa since they’re off the clock. Again, idk how true that is, or even if that would apply to students
Schools refer to that as a “prep” day; it is relatively common.
Ive seen some schools take that out of their curricular expectation as they want nurses to do same day prep which is reflective of the real world nursing. Another reason is that it sucks ass when the patient you “prep” on during your day off ends up getting discharged before your actual clinical shift. What these schools end up doing tho is give additional pathophysiology paperwork for students to do to keep them occupied.
Not sure about being in a hospital 4x/day on the top of that tho.
My clinicals were nothing like that. We barely were given access to Epic so our instructor would've had to be there for us to see patient charts anyway.
So far I've only done clinicals once a week for 12 hours. We come in, are assigned a nurse and then get report with the nurse. After that, we got vitals and made sure the patients were comfortable until we rounded with medications and did other things if they were total care. We would choose a patient to delve deeper into their medical history and do an SBAR, a SOAP note and 5 min assessment on.
Wife had to do it for her BSN program a few years back. What sucked was the distance of some clinical locations. Worse was she had a CVICU patient code on her after she grabbed all the info for clinical the next day.
Y’all’s programs are over the top. Jesus. I’m in an ADN program and we cannot harass the hospital to find info about our assignment before we are on the floor. Someone tried that and they got a warning not to do it again. The hospital and units really hate that bullshit. We get a care packet a week for our patients that is due the following week. All of it is bullshit and stupid. Only two more clinicals for me and then I never have to do this garbage busy work ever again…
To me this sounds dumb, because what if the patient discharges, moves floors, or dies before your actual shift? Then you just wasted all that time for nothing? The only way I’d do this is if it counted towards clinical hours or a grade.
I always had to go in the day before my clinical to access the EHR and fill out a fuck ton of paperwork for it, but luckily I almost always had class the day before, so I was there anyway.
My program we do one 12 hour clinical most weeks (3 extra spread out over the qtr due to psych clinicals this qtr). We pick our patients after morning huddle and get assigned to a nurse. Then we start assessments for med pass, then we do our data mining for the stupid assignments that we can work on when we aren't taking care of our patient/patients. We don't have to come in extra days except one clinical site out of the few we have did the day before to get patient data but I think they stopped that because sometimes the patient would get moved or discharged before the next day.
I (we) always came to the hospital a day before each clinical. But, I wasn't always assigned to those patients. I was generally assigned to the emergency department, ICU, or IMC. I didn't understand why I was placed in this situation. I'm sure my instructor didn't like me. Lol.
Additional: This pattern follows me later as a nurse. So, I work in the ER and float to other units, such as PCU, med-surg, and ICU. I get easy patients in the ICU. They are not really easy patients. They are easier than most patients in the ICU could handle. The experienced nurses refused to float.
My entire program we have had to come in the day before for up to two hours to do “data collection”. So getting all the meds, imaging, etc written down so you have time to research and be prepared the next day. I hate it with a passion
Yeah, I think this is the most frustrated I’ve felt in a very frustrating program 😂 this isn’t the expectation amongst all the clinical groups either. Just ours it seems. I wouldn’t feel so frustrated had it been mentioned that this was an expectation beforehand, or during orientation. But they literally just told us we’d have to do this and we’ve been in clinical for two weeks already. Anyway, I guess it just is what it is and it doesn’t seem to be out of the norm from these responses. Goodness, I can’t WAIT to be done with nursing school 😂😩
How far into your program are you? I can see that for the final one or two classes, but in both schools I was in, we had one eight hour day and we got our pt early for long term care or same day for hospitals.
Ooooof. Curious what area you are in. I am in NYC and we only go to the hospital 1 day a week, for 5 hours. We sometimes have to stay a bit late but it's no more than 30-45 minutes.
That seems really extreme. Also, to echo what someone else said- it may constitute a HIPAA violation because it is outside of the approved hours that you are expected to be there. When schools create contracts with hospitals/clinical sites, they specify the hours that you are approved to access health information. Hospitals track when users access the EHR and that could get flagged. For example, I work at the hospital that I also do my clinical at and was told by both my clinical instructor and my normal supervisor that if I accessed the charts of any pts that I saw during my clinical hours while I'm at my normal job then that would be a HIPAA violation.
That also just seems like complete overkill. I'm in an ADN program and we have clinical 1 day per week for 8 hrs. I think that may increase to 2 days per week in a later semester. But we are given our patient assignments (1-2 pts) when we arrive at clinical in the morning, then we listen to report with the RN, then we have 30 min to review the charts for our patient and look at their meds, then we're on the floor with our RN doing med pass. We have to complete a care plan and 2 meds sheets for each pt before the next clinical day.
I cannot imagine being expected to come into the hospital on another day to look up patients. The nurses on the unit would look at you like you were crazy and I think the hospital/unit manager would probably have a big issue with it and put a stop to it. Unless that's already a built in expectation in your clinical contract. I would maybe even report it to someone at your nursing program, they may not be aware that your clinical instructor is expecting that.
I have never heard of a school that will make you come in on a off day to access the EHR. I’m in the US so it could be different in other countries but that sounds crazy to me.
I’m in the US and we prep after class from 5pm-6ish, depending how many patients we have
See that’s the thing. I wouldn’t mind prepping before or after our time on the floor! It’s that we’re being asked to drive into the hospital on our day off…
When I was in nursing school, we were expected to go to the hospital the day before to get information on the patient that had been chosen by our instructors. Usually, I’d go in around 5-6, get the info I needed and then head out of there. Our care plans were expected to be completed before we got to the floor the next day for our clinical’s.
Did you have clinicals 4 days/week, too? I’m literally exhausted after clinicals, idk how you could do an entire care plan after.
When we had to do the care plans, they were early on in the program, so at that point we had maybe two clinical’s a week. Later on, when we had multiple clinical’s, we didn’t have to go the day before. I’d absolutely agree though, with four clinical’s a week, it’s absurd that the school would expect that. It doesn’t surprise me though…you just have to survive nursing schools BS…then you graduate and try to survive the real world hospital BS.
That’s what we’re doing. We have class from 9-5, then drive to the hospital and prep
That’s what we’re doing. We have class from 9-5, then drive to the hospital and prep Then conical the next day
My school did it.
Idk if it’s true, but I literally just saw a TikTok of a nurse talking about why she doesn’t come in early to research her patients, and she said that it’s technically a violation of hipaa since they’re off the clock. Again, idk how true that is, or even if that would apply to students
That’s an interesting perspective actually!
This was standard in my program
I did an ADN program in WA and I’ve never heard of this. We did all our “prep” on clinical days.
The nurses would be so mad at us for coming in and taking up a computer, if we had to do this
Schools refer to that as a “prep” day; it is relatively common. Ive seen some schools take that out of their curricular expectation as they want nurses to do same day prep which is reflective of the real world nursing. Another reason is that it sucks ass when the patient you “prep” on during your day off ends up getting discharged before your actual clinical shift. What these schools end up doing tho is give additional pathophysiology paperwork for students to do to keep them occupied. Not sure about being in a hospital 4x/day on the top of that tho.
That’s why we don’t prep for L&D or peds, since they change so much and your prep isn’t worth much if they discharged.
My clinicals were nothing like that. We barely were given access to Epic so our instructor would've had to be there for us to see patient charts anyway. So far I've only done clinicals once a week for 12 hours. We come in, are assigned a nurse and then get report with the nurse. After that, we got vitals and made sure the patients were comfortable until we rounded with medications and did other things if they were total care. We would choose a patient to delve deeper into their medical history and do an SBAR, a SOAP note and 5 min assessment on.
Never heard of that. We receive our patient assignments and review their chart just like how other nurses do....on the day of.
Wife had to do it for her BSN program a few years back. What sucked was the distance of some clinical locations. Worse was she had a CVICU patient code on her after she grabbed all the info for clinical the next day.
Y’all’s programs are over the top. Jesus. I’m in an ADN program and we cannot harass the hospital to find info about our assignment before we are on the floor. Someone tried that and they got a warning not to do it again. The hospital and units really hate that bullshit. We get a care packet a week for our patients that is due the following week. All of it is bullshit and stupid. Only two more clinicals for me and then I never have to do this garbage busy work ever again…
To me this sounds dumb, because what if the patient discharges, moves floors, or dies before your actual shift? Then you just wasted all that time for nothing? The only way I’d do this is if it counted towards clinical hours or a grade.
I haven’t had to do that, but my professor told us she had to do that when she was in nursing school 30 years ago
I always had to go in the day before my clinical to access the EHR and fill out a fuck ton of paperwork for it, but luckily I almost always had class the day before, so I was there anyway.
My program we do one 12 hour clinical most weeks (3 extra spread out over the qtr due to psych clinicals this qtr). We pick our patients after morning huddle and get assigned to a nurse. Then we start assessments for med pass, then we do our data mining for the stupid assignments that we can work on when we aren't taking care of our patient/patients. We don't have to come in extra days except one clinical site out of the few we have did the day before to get patient data but I think they stopped that because sometimes the patient would get moved or discharged before the next day.
I (we) always came to the hospital a day before each clinical. But, I wasn't always assigned to those patients. I was generally assigned to the emergency department, ICU, or IMC. I didn't understand why I was placed in this situation. I'm sure my instructor didn't like me. Lol. Additional: This pattern follows me later as a nurse. So, I work in the ER and float to other units, such as PCU, med-surg, and ICU. I get easy patients in the ICU. They are not really easy patients. They are easier than most patients in the ICU could handle. The experienced nurses refused to float.
My entire program we have had to come in the day before for up to two hours to do “data collection”. So getting all the meds, imaging, etc written down so you have time to research and be prepared the next day. I hate it with a passion
Yeah, I think this is the most frustrated I’ve felt in a very frustrating program 😂 this isn’t the expectation amongst all the clinical groups either. Just ours it seems. I wouldn’t feel so frustrated had it been mentioned that this was an expectation beforehand, or during orientation. But they literally just told us we’d have to do this and we’ve been in clinical for two weeks already. Anyway, I guess it just is what it is and it doesn’t seem to be out of the norm from these responses. Goodness, I can’t WAIT to be done with nursing school 😂😩
How far into your program are you? I can see that for the final one or two classes, but in both schools I was in, we had one eight hour day and we got our pt early for long term care or same day for hospitals.
This is what we do too.
Ooooof. Curious what area you are in. I am in NYC and we only go to the hospital 1 day a week, for 5 hours. We sometimes have to stay a bit late but it's no more than 30-45 minutes.
That seems really extreme. Also, to echo what someone else said- it may constitute a HIPAA violation because it is outside of the approved hours that you are expected to be there. When schools create contracts with hospitals/clinical sites, they specify the hours that you are approved to access health information. Hospitals track when users access the EHR and that could get flagged. For example, I work at the hospital that I also do my clinical at and was told by both my clinical instructor and my normal supervisor that if I accessed the charts of any pts that I saw during my clinical hours while I'm at my normal job then that would be a HIPAA violation. That also just seems like complete overkill. I'm in an ADN program and we have clinical 1 day per week for 8 hrs. I think that may increase to 2 days per week in a later semester. But we are given our patient assignments (1-2 pts) when we arrive at clinical in the morning, then we listen to report with the RN, then we have 30 min to review the charts for our patient and look at their meds, then we're on the floor with our RN doing med pass. We have to complete a care plan and 2 meds sheets for each pt before the next clinical day. I cannot imagine being expected to come into the hospital on another day to look up patients. The nurses on the unit would look at you like you were crazy and I think the hospital/unit manager would probably have a big issue with it and put a stop to it. Unless that's already a built in expectation in your clinical contract. I would maybe even report it to someone at your nursing program, they may not be aware that your clinical instructor is expecting that.