My Well-Respected Nursing Program is suffering from a lack of...well, different things on different days, actually. Some days, money; many days, common sense; most days, decent faculty - and proper communication skills? Every damn day.
I am so excited to be a nurse soon that I can hardly stand myself, and am grateful for the opportunity/good fortune that enabled me to pursue it, but this program is, as a classmate recently observed, begun in confusion and will end in disarray. I wish I could give them the benefit of the doubt and say that my Well-Respect Nursing Program is an example of many very intelligent people being better at thinking deep thoughts than organizing a nursing school, but sadly the fact of the matter is that not one iota of this program has the sense God gave a billy goat.
Disbelief? Decide for yourselves. Here is but a sample of their usual behavior:
December: We break for the holiday without an assignment for the spring semester's clinical placements. There are fewer than 50 in my class (split into 6 groups, two each assigned to psychiatry, pediatrics, and obstetrics, which will rotate every 5 weeks) but with several other nursing schools in the area it takes time for the local hospitals to tell each how many students they can take, so we were warned this might happen.
January: We return to school FIVE WEEKS later with still no information on the clinicals and are sent to a new Blitz where we’re informed that we have only half as many clinical instructors as necessary because they all bailed out of their contracts to work at private nursing schools. Only a third of us, those on our psych rotation (including me), will go twice a week as planned, the other two thirds will go to pediatrics or obstetrics only once a week. To make up for the deficit in hours, the peds group has to do an out-of-class project (“the Denver”) and the OB group will do 12 hour days. Our clinical director orders our psych instructor not to give anyone A’s, and denies doing so when confronted about in front of the dean.
Early February: Just before we swap rotations additional instructors are hired so we’ll all have twice-weekly clinical, except due to their schedules the new pediatric group will have one instructor on Tuesdays and a different one on Thursdays. The original peds group still has to do the Denver but the new one does not, the new OB group will have regular 8 hour days, and our hospital assignments are rearranged to accommodate the change. My pediatric group is told we will be going to one hospital, then receives an email welcoming us to a different one, and the night before we are due to begin the new rotation are officially confirmed for the original hospital.
Late February: Syllabus has been sliced and diced so many times in previous years and the last 2 months we ask for a new one. New OB instructor quits after 2 weeks. Half of the OB kids are back to 12 hours a day once a week. The rest of us are not told how this will affect our hospital assignments.
Early March: The peds group (mine) asks for clarification on three very similar projects and are awarded a new, more massive, project (including a presentation on our day off) for our efforts, plus no clarification on the original three. This project is invented and passed along to us by an instructor fired the previous semester for being a generally terrible teacher and human being (she was kept on the faculty for “special university projects”, presumably a re-education regime of some kind).
Late March: We devise a way to combine all the projects into one coherent one and receive permission to make the change. For reasons unknown to us, our clinical director, who has never seen us in the hospital setting, will be grading it instead of our instructor, who sees us every minute of every day. At least there is no mention of not receiving A’s.
Later March: Our clinical director claims not to remember the project change. We do it anyway because it is far too late to do anything else. The other half of the peds group does something entirely different and we are somehow graded as doing to same type and amount of work, by someone who has never seen any of us work. Still no idea what hospital we are officially assigned to for the next rotation but local rumor supplies a plausible candidate. Never did receive a new syllabus.
Early April: About to swap rotations the final time and half of us due to begin the OB rotation receive an email saying they will be back to 8 hour days twice a week at the hospital the other half of us were assigned to. My half of the group receives nothing. The instructor for that hospital says her information jives with the email, and the clinical director is unreachable.
It is currently less than 48 hours before I am due to begin my OB rotation and we are still unable to confirm which of us are assigned to which hospital, under which instructor, how many hours a day or how many days a week. I rest my case.
