The Connection Between Well-Prepared Clinicians and Better Patient Outcomes

Nurses, doctors, advanced practitioners all go through extensive education and training requirements. And yet, no matter how much they prepare, they’re never fully immersed in the pressures and stresses of a true clinical situation. As a student, you just can’t fully replicate the realities of patient care. There’s always those guardrails in place—a teacher, a fully licensed doctor or nurse monitoring the work, maybe even removal from direct consequences.

Simulated environments over true real-world stress. While these academic conditions are a necessary part of the process, it’s important also to prioritize whenever possible situations that expose students to the realities of clinical experience. In this article, we take a look at how thorough preparation can prepare future healthcare workers for the realities of the job.

Overview: Why Preparation Helps Students Get Ready

We touched on it in the introduction. School settings simply cannot organically cover every aspect of healthcare work. A student can be really good at the pen-and-paper element of school, but until they’ve been exposed to the stresses and pressures of healthcare work, they don’t know how they’ll respond when a patient flatlines or when there are 10 things happening at once and they don’t know where to direct their attention.

The good news, of course, is that colleges all over the country already understand the need for clinical experience. Rotations are a constant element of nursing programs everywhere. Even online nursing programs require in-person clinical rotations to help the students prepare for any possible professional situation.

Not only do these rotations give students a taste of what practicing real medicine is like, but they also may help weed out bad-fit candidates. A person might like the idea of nursing but be turned off by its often grisly reality. The best place for that to happen? Certainly not on their first day of working as an RN. That’s a learning experience best had in a controlled environment. Clinical rotations provide that opportunity.

Exposure to Opportunity

Clinical rotations may also expose nursing students to more and better opportunities. While many people think about emergency rooms or hospital floors when they imagine a nurse, there are actually many more potential applications that you may only become exposed to by working in a hospital setting.

There are nursing educators. There are many different kinds of specialists focused on managing very particular conditions or diseases. There are nurses who work with patients suffering from psychiatric symptoms. There are nurses who help deliver babies. There are also nurse practitioners. Nurse practitioners can function in much the same way as a general practitioner. In many states, they write prescriptions, create treatment plans, and see patients without oversight.

Clinical rotations allow students to glimpse these worlds and find out what opportunities might most appeal to them in the long term.

Preparation Can Be Flexible

It’s worth pointing out that though nursing education and preparation should be extensive, that’s not to say that it can’t also be flexible. Many nursing programs now take place in controlled online environments. The digital landscape makes it possible to take classes over a timeframe that makes the most sense for you. For example, if you wanted to take classes at night after your kids have gone to bed, you can do that through many of the more flexible learning opportunities available online.

Clinical requirements are still an important element of these programs. They still take place in person. But more options make the profession open to more people. Inclusivity does not have to come at the cost of preparation.

Is the Standard Clinical Format Enough?

Is the standard clinical formula enough? As mentioned earlier, every nursing preparation program in the country is very literally required to include clinical rotations as part of the preparatory work. That’s a good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the system is perfect. For some students, more opportunities are better.

If you are a nursing student who wants as much exposure as is possible to clinical healthcare work, ask your college what other opportunities they have available. Most probably, they will have something. Maybe there are volunteer opportunities within the community, or maybe they have mentorship programs, career shadowing systems, and other chances to meet and work with established healthcare providers. The more exposure you have, the better prepared you’ll be for a career in healthcare.

Conclusion

Healthcare careers have a very high turnover rate, thanks in large part to the fact that many nursing students enter the workforce without fully understanding the stresses and pressures of the job. How could they? They’ve never done it before.

None of what we said to this point is to imply that clinical rotations or other professional development opportunities fully replicate the realities of working as a nurse or a doctor. It’s different when all of the responsibility is on your shoulders. Still, you can get a good idea of what it’s like by working alongside people who do it every day. You’ll discover your likes and dislikes, build some professional resiliency, and hopefully enter your profession feeling more prepared, confident, and ready to meet the challenges ahead.