5 ways off-hours clinicals can be GREAT experiences
If you’ve been assigned a clinical rotation that happens any other time that the standard first shift, Monday-Friday usual deal, you might be disappointed or frustrated. With the upsurge in nursing school enrollments and limited clinical sites, this is happening more and more. But there are ways to make this work for you. Yes, you won’t be interacting with docs as much, or getting as many post-op patients, but it can still be an advantage:
1. You’ll learn how to do efficient PM care as well as AM care.
2. And because you probably won’t have to wake folks up to do PM care, you’ll be more able to have some of those
3. Speaking of therapeutic communication, this is the perfect time to work on using specific techniques (active listening, sharing hope, sharing silence) or collect data for your Social Reminiscence assignment.
4. You’ll get more experience dealing not just patients’ families, but with the family dynamics. In the evening, you’ll see more families visiting the hospitalized patient as a unit, since it’s outside conventional 9-5 working hours.
5. There are still plenty of meds to give and treatments to do! Most wound care is done at least twice a day, often at AM and HS, and patients often take almost meds HS as they do first thing in the morning.