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What are Nursing Clinicals? What should you expect on your first day of clinicals? Today we’re going to be answering all of your questions about clinicals in nursing school!
Also check out our other nursing student resources for more guides, tips and tricks to get you through nursing school!
What are Nursing Clinicals?
Nursing clinicals are an experience within nursing school that focuses on the clinical side of nursing. For example, you would focus on skills such as IV starts or Foley catheter insertions versus pathophysiology.
Nursing students go through clinicals throughout nursing school to get a hands-on learning experience. As nursing students progress through school their clinical experiences should get more and more involved.
At the end of school, nursing students are expected to complete a senior practicum. This is an experience that is designed to help transition a student nurse to a new nurse.
What to Expect Your First Day of Clinicals?
On your first day of nursing clinicals you should expect to be put to work.
Nursing school clinicals are notoriously challenging. You can either be stuck with a very scary instructor, a bad clinical site or just a straight boring experience. Whatever the case is, try to make the absolute most out of it that you can.
No matter what your experiences are, they won’t prepare you for the life of a real nurse. But you can take as much out of it as you can.
Show up prepared and eager to learn for clinical (the nurses you’re with will notice and be more willing to help you). You should also ask questions when you don’t know, don’t forget you will be taking care of real patients, so don’t leave things up to
chance.
If you have a boring clinical (meaning that there isn’t a lot for the nursing students to do, which does happen), then study or try to learn something. Make a goal to learn something that day, then make it happen.
What to Expect on Your First Day of Nursing School?
Your first day can be one of the most important days in your nursing school career. It is when your new teachers list out their expectations, pass out their syllabi, give you important due dates, and let you know about clinical experiences. Typically, the first day in class is fairly boring.
However, there are definitely professors out there that will start right from the get-go. So, be prepared. Come to class expecting to learn and be ready to take notes. You can’t assume that the entire class will be spent going over the syllabus. In other college courses, professors might be quite lax on the first day. But you’ll learn very quickly that nothing is lax in nursing school.
There is a lot of information to learn, and they only have a limited amount of time to teach it. With that said, expect for information to come quickly. You might not be used to picking and choosing what to write down, but you’ll have to learn.
