Change of Shift is back in nursing school!

It’s time for Change of Shift, Volume II, Number 6, and it’s also time for another new semester of nursing school. If your town is like mine, clinical placements are scarce, which means there are students swarming in your hospitals and community health clinics in droves. Nurses I speak to have mixed feelings about this. Some love students: our enthusiasm, the extra helping hands, and the chance to pass on their vast wealth of experience to the next generation of nursing professionals. Nurse K from Crass Pollination loves us for another reason: our protective barrier. No, not the way we get between you and the projectile-vomiting patient in room 3, but the way nothing exciting ever seems to happen when there’s a student around.

Then there are those nurses who resent all the questions and feel like we slow them down with our skill check-offs , and nervous double-and-triple-checking our med passes. The ones who spend every free moment telling us how stupid we are for going into nursing, pointing out our newbie mistakes in front of family members and other hospital staff, and sending even the best of us home in tears. I wonder if these nurses remember what it was like to be a student. Terry over at Counting Sheep sure does. Something tells me she’s always nice to the new grads.

Another nurse who definitely remembers how hard it was to be a student is KimRN from Emergiblog. She doesn’t have any advice for students today. Her advice is for her colleagues.

One of my instructors told me there are are two ways of learning: mistakes and mentors. I will make of lot of mistakes, but hopefully I will save myself from a few by listening to those who have been were I am now. Speaking of mistakes, Caroline over at BrainScramble is brave enough to admit hers during her first assessment with a stethoscope. Then head over to Not Nurse Ratched so she can tell us what she wishes she knew. And we all know we’d better listen to our mama. Mother Jones has some excellent back-to-school advice over at Nurse Ratched’s Place.

One thing nursing students and nurses alike always need to do is stay organized. It sometimes seems like an impossible dream, but to help, Lifehacker lists their top 10 software tools for the organized student.

I don’t know about other nursing students, but sometimes, nothing beats a good ol’ war story. Disappearing John gives us freshers a glimpse of what we’ll be in for in the real world in his account of a shift where he and his team were stretched to the limit.

A lot of emphasis is put toward getting a job after school, but ERNursey knows when it’s time to quit the one you have. I don’t know if she’d like Max’s job, though. Max E Nurse is a Nurse Practitioner in General Practice with the NHS. He is also a nag.

Finally, a few rules to live by, whether you like it or not. Props to the Cranky Prof for pointing out these Murphy’s Laws for Nurses.

Thanks for coming over for this special edition of Change of Shift! It’s back home to Mama Kim on September 20th at Emergiblog. You can submit your nurse-written and nursing-related posts to Blog Carnival, or directly to Kim at kmcallister-nine-one-one at yahoo.com.