Welcome to the world of nursing! The best advice I can give you is to find a job where you have a long orientation. If you can find one that offers a new grad residency program, go for it. This is a new model in new nurse orientation and is beginning to appear in hospitals all around the country. It’s a year long program designed to support new nurses through the ups and owns of their first year as a nurse. Most orientation programs are six months or less, and usually about six months is when new nurses suddenly feel overwhelmed and stupid. And just at the point where they…
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Tips for Documentation
Documentation is such an important part of nursing. Yes, I know, you’d rather be spending that time with the patient, but communication is an important part of nursing. Documenting the care you gave, the patient’s response and your observations is vital to optimum care. Stop thinking about it as a chore and think of how what you write will help improve the quality of care and the patient’s outcomes. It has to be done just like any of the other procedures you put off till the last minute. Learn to do it well and it’ll be much easier. Here are a few important Do’s and Don’ts for you to remember…
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Nursing Schools With No Waiting List
Far too many students have received rejection letters recently from their choice of nursing school. Nursing programs are overcrowded and most have long waiting lists. Each year they turn away hundreds of qualified students due to lack of funding, and a lack of nurse educators. Sadly, the shortage of nurses also affects the number of nurse educators. Low salaries and poor benefits add to the problem. The Title VIII Nurse workforce Development fund is always a victim of budget cuts and nurses have to fight just to get the same funding as the previous year let alone an increase that would help resolve a nursing shortage! There are however, a…
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New Newsletter Service
I am changing the newsletter service. The old service was way too cumbersome to sign up. Sorry I didn’t know that. This one is simple. Enter your Email address in the box in the right hand column, and then respond to the email confirmation in your mail box. Anyone who was already signed up has been transferred to this new service. If however, you don’t receive the newsletter tomorrow, please be sure to sign up again. It’s easy this time I promise. The newsletter is in HTML format and is sent every Wednesday morning (10 Am PST). If your Email program cannot read HTML mail, you’ll see a link to…
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It’s International Nurses Day
Wishing nurses everywhere a Happy International Nurses Day. May 12 is the anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale who is often referred to as the founder of nursing for her contributions to the nursing profession. One of the things Ms. Nightingale is credited with is bringing infection control measures to the battlegrounds of Turkey during the Crimean war. Many lives were saved as a result of her efforts to teach about improving sanitary conditions and clean techniques. Many oppose using Ms. Nightingale as a representative of the nursing profession for being out of touch with today’s nurses. Yet oddly enough, today we still battle those issues of infection control.…