What Happens in BSN Degree Nursing Clinicals

One of the most rewarding parts about being a nurse is that every day is different. That’s also what makes the job challenging. As a student in a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program, you receive critical on-the-job training through required clinical rotations. By the time you graduate, you’ll have hundreds of hours of experience to draw on — and the confidence that when you take a job in this fast-growing field, you can stand on your own.

 

What Are Clinicals?

Every BSN student completes clinical rotations in a real-world setting. These hands-on experiences, supervised by an on-site clinical instructor, let you apply lessons learned in classes and laboratories to patient care across a broad range of settings. 

While the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN) requires clinical rotations from every BSN program, the amount of time you spend on clinicals varies from school to school and state to state.

 

Clinical Requirements

Students typically spend upwards of 500 hours on clinicals over the course of their college career, with some programs providing more than 1,000 hours of hands-on experience. While some BSN programs begin clinical rotations as early as the first semester, other programs begin nursing clinicals in junior year. 

As a nursing student, you’ll typically spend several days a week doing clinical rotations, in shifts as short as 4–6 hours or as long as 8–12 hours.

 

What Will You Do During a Nursing Clinical?

Your time in clinical rotations starts with basic tasks and increases in complexity as you get closer to graduation. You may have just a handful of patients per shift during your earliest rotations. As you gain more experience, you become responsible for more patients and duties. 

As a nursing student, you might:

• Perform patient assessments
• Record vital signs
• Administer medications
• Care for wounds and change dressings
• Create and update patient care plans
• Bathe patients
• Assist with procedures

Your responsibilities won’t end when your shift is done. Often, you need to study background information on patients you’ll see during an upcoming shift, prepare care plans, complete paperwork or reflect on lessons learned during a shift. This out-of-class work can be significant and must be completed alongside your other classroom assignments.

You’ll work with other nurses at each clinical site. These experienced nurses serve as mentors and supervisors, offering feedback, instruction, encouragement and critical assessment of your performance. They’re there to help you grow as practitioners, and the best nursing students rely on them as they build their skills.

 

Where You’ll Work

Nurses work in settings as diverse as medical-surgical wards, pediatric units, hospices, ICU floors and mental health clinics. While nursing students in rural areas may complete clinical rotations in just a few different places, students in urban environments may rotate through any number of sites. 

As you complete rotations in various places, you also become more familiar with different nursing specialties. These include:

• Acute care
• Cardiac
• Geriatric
• Home health care
• Neonatal care
• Obstetrics
• Oncology
• Rehabilitation

Your nursing program will coordinate your clinical experience. You will rotate through many different nursing specialties, building your skill set as a nurse generalist and discovering your professional interests.

 

What Nursing Skills Will You Develop? 

If you’ve spent any time as a patient, you already have first-hand knowledge of how much we rely on nurses. They draw blood, insert IVs and catheters, change dressings, administer medications and perform countless other tasks on the front lines of patient care. 

Clinicals help you acquire those technical skills. Just as importantly, though, the hundreds of hours you spend working with patients, their families, other nurses, doctors and support staff build interpersonal and professional competencies that make you a good caregiver and colleague. 

Learn to think critically — and quickly — while remaining patient and adaptable under pressure. Additionally, you become a more effective communicator as you interact with patients and their families, providing them with information about their care. At the same time, you develop skills in teamwork and time management, learning to accept constructive feedback and collaborate with others whose abilities complement yours.

 

Connecting Coursework to Patient Care

Each of your nursing classes exposes you to an aspect of the job: Anatomy teaches about the human body, for example, while pharmacology exposes you to common therapies, and ethics introduces difficult situations you may need to navigate.

Clinical rotations enable you to apply those lessons in practice, transforming case studies and textbook examples into practical lessons. While you won’t encounter every possible situation, you’ll become comfortable with trusting your education and training — as well as your instincts, when things don’t unfold as planned.

 

How to Make Your BSN Clinical a Success

Nobody becomes a good nurse overnight. It takes years of experience to thrive in the profession. The most successful nursing students approach their clinicals with curiosity, a willingness to receive feedback (even when it is uncomfortable) and the capacity to reflect on what’s working in their practice and what isn’t. Preparation counts: Become familiar with common conditions in the unit where you’re assigned, and always take time to review the patients you’ll be working with.

Your preceptors and clinical instructors are there to help you improve. Ask questions when you’re unsure what to do and be an active participant in clinical conferences. When the day is done, compare what you’ve observed with what you learned in class.

Clinical rotations aren’t just a box to check off a list of requirements. They’re a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build experience that will shape the nurse you become.

 

What Are the Admissions Requirements for a BSN Program?

While admission requirements to BSN programs vary by institution, all require students to have a high school diploma. First-time college students can enroll in a traditional, four-year BSN program, completing prerequisite classes before pursuing beginning nursing classes in their program. 

Typical application requirements include:

• Entrance exam, such as the Test for Essential Academic Skills (TEAS) or the Health Education Systems Inc. Admissions Assessment (HESI A2)
• Essay
• Letters of Recommendation
• Résumé/CV
• Minimum GPA in pre-professional nursing classes

Students who already have a non-nursing college degree may qualify for entry to an accelerated BSN program. To be admitted to these 12- to 18-month programs, students must have completed prerequisite nursing courses.

Both the traditional and accelerated pathways result in BSN degrees and prepare you for the NCLEX-RN exam, which you must pass to become a registered nurse. But not every program is the same. As you consider which to attend, compare the amount of clinical experience you’ll get as well as faculty expertise, locations where students complete clinicals, quality of campus training labs and other facilities.

 

Nursing Experience That Leads to a Lifetime of Care

Where you complete your nursing degree matters. In Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University’s BSN program, you study to become a nurse in an environment as devoted to technical proficiency as the Catholic and Franciscan tradition of social justice. 

FranU offers two pathways to earn a BSN: a traditional four-year track for incoming, first-time college students, as well as an accelerated, 16-month program aimed at students who have already finished a bachelor’s degree in another field. Both provide extensive hands-on training at our Simulated Environment Teaching Hospital (SETH), rich clinical experiences at Baton Rouge-area institutions and mentorship from faculty who want you to succeed.

And you will: 100% of students on our accelerated track and 98.5% of traditional students pass the licensure exam on their first attempt, with 100% of FranU nursing students employed within a year of graduation.