Healthcare social media encompasses the use of many social media platforms by both patients and clinicians, including nurses, in order to share information, stories, experience, and form communities.
What Advice Would You Give a New Nursing Student? Our Readers Respond…
By Karen Roush, MSN, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor
My daughter Kim is starting nursing school next month, so last week I asked AJN’s Facebook followers for the best piece of advice I could give her. The response was overwhelming: over 600 people offered wisdom, encouragement, and tips for success. I went through and read them all and the following is an attempt to synthesize the advice.
Of course, with so many responses, there were many valuable pieces of advice I had to leave out, from the practical to the profound, such as:
sit in the front of class, stick to your principles, invest in good shoes, choose clinicals that push you out of your comfort zone, be early for everything, celebrate the small victories, get a really good stethoscope up front, believe in yourself, pick the hardest patient you can at clinical, audiorecord the lectures, be truthful and committed to your work, eat healthy, get to know your instructors, coffee and chocolate!
And finally: look into the eyes of your patients and be sure they know you care. Every patient, every time.
(Oh, and not to leave out the lighthearted—Don’t hold your nose in clinicals. The teachers frown on that.)
Below are five areas of advice that stood out:
1) “Take a […]
crocus shoots, early spring, I think/ via Wikimedia Commons 
