In about October I was notified via email that the next course would be a psych course (already knew this but was reminded of it) and was told to begin the search to find a suitable placement. I believe I've said it before but it really irks me (maybe a tad more ;P) that I have to find my OWN placement as well as preceptor while the school sits back and does jack shit except do the clinical contract with the facility. Complete bullshit IMO. The old school that I was going to (for my LPN/RPN as well as my previous BSN) did this leg work for us (and was compensated IMO for this) which made life easier and certainly less stressful. This was something that I asked before committing myself to this school because I don't think it should be my responsibility to do this.
So for this semester my hubby thought to find a list of ALL the NPs and so I began calling them ALL - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!!! And was told that if I didn't find a preceptor in that two week period of time that I would have to abandon that course! So off I went asking whether they would be willing to "oversee" a basic review of assessments that I would do in front of them. Only ONE off a list of probably 30-40 ppl said yes. And OMG am I thankful to this person!!! Told her everytime I saw her! I was certainly stressed out and certainly worried that I would have to postpone starting my core nursing courses because of this stupid thing that I was told by the university to wait on until I was officially "IN" the course. It's complete bullshit IMO and I should have been advised of this.
Now getting back to October... I procrastinated on finding a suitable placement and figured that the school would do ANY of the leg work. Now it's December and I come to find that the school basically did jack shit in terms of helping me. A couple of days ago hubby wanted me to start doing the same thing as before but now focusing on calling the "key" people in the hospitals who would enable me to have a pysch rotation in the hospital. Focused on big hospitals and then I decided to broaden my search to smaller ones. Then hubby had an epiphany that it would be smart to check out the psychiatric nurses' association. I figured it couldn't hurt anything and off we went calling them. They instructed us on how to find the local chapter ppl and then we went off googling these people to see about contacting them directly to see if I could network with them to find a placement. Hell these people wouldn't be part of this association if they weren't somehow involved in psychiatry right?!
Next day I called up a couple of people and happened upon one lady who said that so long as I was allowed to do it at an out-pt clinic or in ppl's homes then she could help me. YAAAAYYYYYYYYYY OMG I was eccstatic. The relief was immense let me tell you!
Now I'm trying to convince hubby to register for next semester's courses. He doesn't seem overly keen on this idea though (not sure of the exact reasoning seeing as he told me that once I secured a placement then we would register being that we'd been in this sort of predicament already right).
So I started the paperwork with the uni to get the contract going so that in January I can start my placement hours. The good thing (though weird) is that for that course it only requires FORTY hours. Crazy low amount, very shocking to me and to the lady I spoke with. I don't really care so long as I get the hours in.
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