NursingZen

Week 1
Winter quarter started Wednesday, January 3. Family & Child Nursing is our main course, and it lasts only 6 weeks because we will then have Psychiatric nursing. Our Pediatric clinical rotations were scheduled to begin this first Thursday & Friday, but at the last minute we were told that some of us had the week off and some were observing healthy kids at daycare centers instead. Still in vacation mode, many of us were relieved to not have to jump right back into back-to-back 12-hour shifts. We thought our professor was being kind to us.

Week 2
The Family & Child Nursing readings and lectures are well under way. Because the course is 6 weeks, it’s going to fly by. Med-Surg is our foundation, but we’re now learning about how pediatric health conditions and nursing interventions differ from adults. Child development informs everything. It’s a refreshing way to look at nursing. As I read the text, I’m intermittently excited for the challenge of working with kids and their parents, and also worried about seeing very sick children. The thought of sticking a needle or a foley into a child pains me. But the professor, also a Pediatric nurse practitioner, is an empathetic and enthusiastic teacher. She makes me excited to apply what we’re hearing in lecture to real patients. For days I’ve been mentally prepping myself for clinicals. I go to Whole Foods to buy a bottle of herbal sleep aid pills.

Suddenly at the end of lecture, three administrators come in to our class unannounced and begin talking. At first I’m utterly confused. I feel like I* just joined a conversation that had been going on, instead of them joining us. For 2 minutes they talk in circles about how they’re trying very hard to ‘figure out’ our clinical rotations.

And then it dawns on each of us: they are still trying to hire Clinical Instructors (CIs) and until they find six CIs, none of us will have clinicals at our designated sites! Whoa!!

A classmate interrupts and lays it out in plain terms, and the administrators concede the truth: They have been searching for CIs since December but they can’t find anyone because of the “terrible nursing teacher crisis.” They have been putting off telling us the real situation until it got to a critical point. They joke that our professor has been “great at distracting” us with daycare and other hospital observations while they look for CIs.

Nursing teacher shortage? Understood. But I’m stunned by how we got where we are:

1) Why didn’t MEPN have Clinical Instructors hired and ready to go from months before this quarter? Why were they looking for CIs during the Christmas holidays? (A classmate saw a job posting on Craigslist.org over the holidays.)

2) Why wasn’t MEPN transparent about the situation from the beginning? I’m inclined to believe that the staff is trying their best to deliver what the program promised us, but it’s hard to not feel like I’m being misled when they’re not upfront and straightforward.

3) What does this mean for our qualification for the Board of Registered Nursing license? What if we are required to have a certain number of clinical hours in Pediatrics? (Looking into this.)

Some people are annoyed, some are ambivalent, many are angry, especially partners and family members. I feel badly for classmates who are specializing in Pediatrics. Some suffered through 12 weeks of Med Surg with an eye on this quarter. I’m disappointed because I was looking forward to the challenge of peds nursing, because who knows — though the thought of nursing sick kids scares the crap out of me right now, an in-depth clinical experience might change my mind and make me realize that I’d love to work in this area! I was all set to ride the highs and lows of peds nursing and to write about my Growth and awesome, beautiful, painful, rewarding, fun times! I really do not like writing about this other crap. Unfortunately, this crap has gotten in the way of those experiences.

I’m sure the staff is working furiously on damage control, or else this will all be hugely embarrassing. Let’s see what happens next week, Week 3.