With the current challenges facing healthcare and the world, we want to shine a light on the students and new nurses who are coming into the field during this unprecedented time.

We hope to raise awareness of their situations and help to amplify what needs to be done to ensure that nurses feel comfortable and supported in the healthcare field.

Situations cannot change with truth. We hope their stories will resonate with you and can create change within the field of nursing.

In the sixth video of our series, we ask the students, what would have made those experiences more meaningful or helpful for learning.

[Transcript]

Fernanda
At my last clinical, it would have been a lot more meaningful if I could have been right there. At all times. You know. Rather than doing like a little Zoom or those computer meetings.

Victoria
So I think that, like, if there was a way to because all nursing programs have these in-person critical hours of the students are required to complete before clinical. So specifically I think being held for 10 to 12 hours on a virtual clinical isn't exactly super beneficial. I think that it gets pretty redundant after 4 or 5 hours. Like if we could take some of the hours and incorporate them somewhere else in-person I know that's really hard to say and maybe shorten the virtual aspect of it.

I think that maybe students would get a little bit more out of it because the time that you're actually completing the V-Sim activities in the V-Sims don't take as long and then discussing it and whatever assignments they give you. But I know that's hard to say because I feel like they are trying to do the best job that they can, the staff, to make it as real as possible.

But they're trying out, trial and error, what works. As more and more students come through in this virtual learning environment and how to get these nursing students the most you can to a computer screen. I guess.

Olivia
Trying to encourage you to spend more time with your patients and kind of look past what was required for a grade. I think some instructors kind of said, don't worry about the paperwork as much, and they were easier graders, which made it easier for us to kind of take advantage of the patients that we had and really learn from them.

I mean, one clinical instructor said, if you have a patient that is basically teaching you everything you need to know, I don't care if you include it in the paperwork or finish it on time. I'd rather you get that hands-on experience than worry about the paperwork. And I think those experiences made it meaningful because you don't forget the interactions you have with patients.

And I remember experiences I had from the nursing home my first clinical than I do the paperwork I did for that day. Those are the things that you remember, and you can learn things from their family members and how they've had interactions with health care providers. And you can have experiences from sitting in on meetings with the doctors and the social workers versus what you're putting on a med sheet.

And I think taking advantage of that and taking advantage of using the electronic health record and putting the assessments in versus writing them down for our instructor to see later was definitely something we benefited from more. So just trying to take advantage of that hands on experience and maybe set aside the fact that this is a requirement for you to graduate, that we need you to be able to accomplish.

Caroline
I think it's like impossible to ask, but if in lecture we were able to like go over a little bit more in depth on like the condition your patient has or like something you might see in the hospital, it might be helpful. I mean, we do that, but it doesn't necessarily always apply to the patient. You get. So I think that you can't ask for them to go over every single condition ever.

My teacher has done a good job of like going over the large disease categories, I guess things you would commonly see in the hospital, like hypertension, diabetes, like we've gone over that extensively. A lot of people who we've been seeing like do have those like co-morbidities. That's been really helpful because then you kind of understand that a little bit better and how it can relate to something bigger.

So I guess maybe just more of that would be helpful.