Archive for the ‘School’ Category

Spring Break couldn’t come any faster..

March 3rd, 2012 by Melissa Nelson '10

Hey everyone!!!!  It has been awhile since I have posted anything. Sorry! This past week was hectic between final exams, validations and midterms. You are probably wondering why final exams are so early and what  is validation?

So as you know I am in an accelerated BSN/MSN program. There are two phases: the BSN phase and the MSN phase. I am in the BSN phase and will complete this phase by the end of this year. So in nursing school(BSN phase), we have clinical rotations. The clinical rotations you complete at Penn and most nursing schools are: medical surgical, geriatrics, obstetrics, pediatrics, community health, psychiatric and preceptorship. Our class will correlate with the rotation we are on to reaffirm what we are learning in clinical.  For example, when I was doing my medical-surgical rotation, we had a 3 hour medical-surgical class, twice a week as well.These rotations last 7 weeks. During these rotations, we take care of patients just as a nurse would, but under supervision by our clinical instructor( usually a practicing advanced  practice nurse such as an Nurse Practitioner). This past week, I finished my OB rotation(hence why I had a final exam) and I loved it!!!! It was absolutely amazing and I got to see and learn a lot about vaginal/ cesarean births and newborn care. My experience just reaffirmed I have definitely picked the right profession.

Validations is the term we use for our practical lab exams. So at Penn, we having nursing labs 2 hours a week where we learn how to do various skills such as: chest tube care, nasogastric tube, airway/oxygenation care, IV insertion and etc.  We practice these skills on Sim Man. Once we have learned these skills, we then have validations. Validation occurs in one of our stimulated labs with a Sim Man/Sim Annie/Sim Baby. These stimulated labs are set up like an actually hospital rooms(supplies/emergency equipment included).

We are given a scenario that tests us on the skills that we learn and we must be able to apply them to the situation. So for example, they might give us a situation such as a patient was in  motor vehicle accident and is now on your floor. They have a chest tube, a nasogastric tube and a tracheotomy. You are the nurse taking care of him/her.  As you are taking care of the patient, you begin to notice that his oxygen saturation levels are going down from 96% to 89%. What do you do?   As you can see these practical lab exams can be stressful especially since you never know what your getting. Your patient can be fine when your doing an assessment and suddenly there is a change in his/her status. I do like the practical lab exams because it really allows you to incorporate everything you have learned so far. But its stressful because you need to pass in order to pass the course.  By the way , I did pass 🙂

With all these things happening this past week, I am so happy Spring Break is here! Im really not doing anything too interesting, but I will be catching up with my sleep 🙂