Get ready for a fast-talking person to give you some fast-paced notes on what to expect from nursing school labs. Good thing you can read at your leisure. For fun, you can imagine me speed-talking through this so you can feel the anxiety I felt starting labs!
Day 1 in lab you’re going to dive right in with those head-to-toes and throughout the weeks, you’re going to add a piece of the assessment and practice over and over until you’re literally reciting the script in your sleep and waking up asking about someone’s LBM (last bowel movement) 🙂
You’ll learn how to check vital signs on your partner, go through a whole skin assessment, learn a very comprehensive neuro exam, go through all the joints/muscles in the musculoskeletal system, listen for heart and lung sounds, assess the cardiovascular system, and go through the GI/GU systems! It’ll feel like so much every week, but through repetition and hands-on practice it’ll start getting easier and easier.
To pass lab, you’ll first have to pass your “vital sign checkout” which was about the middle of the semester (week 5) for me. You and your partner will have to get a full set (temp, heart rate, respiration rate, manual BP, and pulse-ox) in front of a professor. And then come the end of the semester, you’ll have to pass your assessment checkout as well as your skill. You’ll do a condensed “full body assessment” on your partner in front of the professor as well as demonstrate a “skill” on a mannequin. For us the skills were either straight cathing a female or suctioning a tracheostomy. Both require sterile technique, which you’ll become very familiar with!
This first semester will fly by and you will quickly find yourself standing in front of a naked female mannequin trying to get your sterile gloves on your sweaty hands as you go to straight cath her with the scary, intimidating professor just waiting for you to break sterility.
Use your time wisely because you don’t want to have to be scrambling at the end of the semester to find time to go to the lab on your (very few) days off just to practice your skills because you didn’t practice enough in the allotted 7-hour block of time you already had to be there.
Lab is super long day. Ours went from 1pm-8pm, and that’s already after your whole long, stressful morning of classes. Everyone knows it’s exhausting and a good chunk of people are going to be complaining and tired. Please don’t be thaaaat guy. Try your hardest to soak up everything you can, ask a lot of questions, laugh with each other, talk to all the professors (they all probably work at hospitals you’ll want jobs later) and try your hardest to be excited to be there, even if you’re faking it.
You’re going to have a great first day and will already feel one step closer to becoming a real-life nurse! Before I send you off, I thought I would share what I remember about my first day of lab back in 2017!
So, my lab instructor was amazing and hilarious, and also quite intimidating. We went through the whole day practicing our assessments on each other in our little patient gowns, feeling super awkward. We thought we were doing all good until at the end, she actually made us stand up in front of our group, wearing our little dresses and give a verbal report of our findings on our partner, by memory.
Like okay I could barely even remember my poor partner’s name let alone a report on her age, orientation, the inside of her mouth, her hair, her pulses, her cap refill, and if her skin tented??? It was scary and kind of funny and I was also probably tachycardic in the 140. However, every week we struggled through this same process until we gave our verbal reports confident AF and killed our checkout at the end of Q1. It was so clear how far we had come in those 10 short weeks, so be okay with exactly where you are right now. Be able to laugh at yourself and know that soon all of this will soon come second-nature!
If this story stressed you out or just want to see what to expect, go head and watch some youtube videos on head-to-assessments and how nurses organize their report and breakdown the systems in the body. This is a skill that even as a nurse now, I’m always continually working on.
Head to Toe Assessment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8PWBLAfsGU
(Pretty accurate to what you’ll be practicing in lab, but don’t worry you won’t have to do this all the first week!)
*side note, those few skills that I mentioned to pass your checkout most like don’t just disappear at the end of semester. Literally drill this stuff into your brain now because to graduate the program (for me), those same skills resurface and you have to re-checkout in your last semester to pass your capstone class!