Time management and organization can get the best of even the best nursing student.
Try these 3 organization tools:
http://www.nrsng.com/54
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Transcription:
The question comes from a student who emailed me and asked,
Thank you so much for the easy to read lab value chart. What I'm struggling with is time management techniques. I will be a graduate nurse in May. I also struggle with keeping a neat, simple, and short cheat sheet to record my assessments on patients. I can't seem to keep a particular order. By the end of shift, I'm writing all over the paper. Other things include answering select all that apply questions and remembering certain meds. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Okay, so let's dive right into it. I want to give you three tools that are going to help you with organization during clinical assignments and with helping you keep kind of a little bit better organization in giving shift report, in organizing yourself and in basic just management of your time and your energy while you're on the nursing floor.
Clinical Assistant
The first tool that I'm going to give you is this clinical assessment tool. This is a clinical assistant tool and I developed this while in nursing school and it is an enormous help with keeping yourself organized. Let's kind of talk about it real quick.
What we have up here at the top is, this is the reason they're hospitalized, so be it a lapcoly, a stroke, whatever the reason is, you kind of put this here. Then down here we have our assessment man, so you would put, you know maybe they were a fall and they had a subdermal hematoma, you'd put a little mark here, or maybe they had surgery on the abdomen, you could put a little mark here, chest tube over here on the right side. Basically you could just kind of use this to do the complete assessment of the patient. Then over here you have some assessment notes.
You can kind of keep track of some of the notes and things that you have with your patient and some of the things that have happened with them. You could write down the consultation and tests. Maybe they had a consultation with palliative care, you could kind of write that down, the date that happened. Maybe they had a barium swallow test, we could put that here, the date that happened. Then over here, this is kind of just, gives you enough spots to put some of the medications that you might give your patient during your shift.
You write the name of the medication, so lisinopril, let's say, to help lower blood pressure, we want to watch for first dose hypotension, cough, hyperkalemia, and then the time that you're going to give it. You could put this for all the different medications that you're giving and so that will kind of keep you organized with your meds, the times they're given, some of the considerations and the reason. This will help you with your post clinical paperwork and it will help you as well keep organized for when you need to give the meds. Then over here, we have a very short normal lab value chart.
We have our basic BMP, we have some of our PH values, our CO2, our BUN, some of our blood coagulation times and things like that. This is just really handy, if you look at your patient's lab values you don't got to be digging around all over the place. You can just look at this and say what the normals are and then you can kind of write it like, say your patient's sodium is 129, you could write that right next to sodium, then you know very quickly that it's a low value. That can be very helpful with your post clinical paperwork as well as kind of during clinical to know where your patient's lab values are at.
