Accelerated Nursing Students: What Do They Believe Will Happen on the First Clinical Day
Undergraduate Program Director, Oakland University School of Nursing
3004 Human Health Building, Rochester, MI 48309
Abstract
Accelerated nursing (AN) programs have proliferated across the United States. Because AN curricula
are taught at an accelerated pace, AN students tend to start their first clinical experiences early in the program,
before they have received much formal education regarding what professional nursing is and what is expected of
students in the clinical setting. The first clinical day has been described as stressful for nursing students (Wolf,
Stidham, & Ross, 2015), yet there was nothing found in the literature that described what AN students think will
happen on the first clinical day or what will be expected of them. As a result, one Midwestern school of nursing
conducted a quality improvement project to assess what the AN students thought would happen on the first
clinical day. Specifically, the students were asked to “Describe what you think will happen on the first day of
clinical”. The results revealed four themes, but the majority of AN students thought they would be a “doer” and
few reported the use of critical thinking or the application of newly learned nursing knowledge as something they
would do on the first clinical day. Based on the project’s findings, the implications for nurse educators who teach
in AN curricula are discussed
