 Early Clinical Scheduling Helps
Pediatric Hospital
"When can we get in our clinical instruction?"
This question is part of a yearly headache for many nursing
program coordinators—finding where and when their nursing students can get
that essential hands-on experience they need to enter into the profession.
Waiting until the last minute may be the problem, but Mt. Washington Pediatric
in Baltimore has a surprisingly simple solution.
"We schedule all of our pediatric clinical training for the
year over the summer and we're done," said Barbara Scharf, M.S.N., M.P.H.,
R.N., Director of Education & Nursing Research at Mt. Washington.
Scharf says that being proactive is the key to accommodating
everyone.
"We send out a letter in May or June to all of the Maryland
nursing schools requesting that they put in their clinical requests for the
entire year. We then take all of these requests at once, fit them all together,
and make a calendar," said Scharf, emphasizing that many factors are taken into
account. "We can't have duplicate schools on the same floors at the same time,
we utilize weekdays and weekends, and we squeeze everyone in - at least for
some of the time they want," she said.
Offering a multitude of rehabilitation and complex medical
services for infants and children, the 102-bed Mt. Washington has eight schools
of nursing and 180 students doing their pediatric clinical rotations at the
facility. With 2 patient care areas (in Baltimore and in Cheverly), and with
advanced planning, Scharf says the hospital can be flexible when it needs to
be.
"Our hospital philosophy is that we want to accept any
nursing school we possibly can and try to fit in all of the schools," she said.
The extra clinical instruction serves as a recruitment tool.
The more students trained at Mt. Washington, the more they get to know the
place and want to work there after graduation, said Scharf.
In addition to helping the hospital, the advanced scheduling
is designed to benefit Maryland nursing programs, many of which have to turn
students away for lack of faculty and clinical sites.
As a result of the hospital's program, two degree tracks at
the Community College of Baltimore County - L.P.N. and R.N. - were able to
increase their enrollment because the hospital had more time to schedule their
pediatric clinical. Simple planning measures like Mt. Washington's may become
part of a larger solution to alleviate a statewide nursing shortage and Scharf
hopes that other hospitals will jump on board.
"We've always taken a proactive approach by asking colleges
to put in their clinical times early, and it's helped us," she said, noting
that other hospitals tend to wait until they receive requests to schedule their
clinical instruction, allowing for a barrage of frantic phone calls at the
beginning of the semester.
For the present, Mt. Washington employees welcome as many
clinical students as they can. "Constant clinical instruction is very time
consuming," said Scharf, "but here we are really committed to students. Our
nursing staff are excellent and very welcoming, so the students get to see a
lot."
Editor's Note: At an Aug. 3 meeting hosted by the Maryland
Hospital Association, hospital and nursing school representatives from across
the state began to develop strategies to assure that student nurses have access
to clinical practice sites. The group came up with several recommendations
including creating a regionalized approach to clinical placements. A summary of
the group's recommendations has been distributed to MHA member hospitals for
future implementation.
Contact:
Barbara Scharf, M.S.N., M.P.H.,
R.N.
Director of Education & Nursing Research
Mt. Washington
Pediatric Hospital
Phone: (410) 578-5020
E-mail: bscharf@mwph.org
(Back to the top)
|
