The nursing school directors recently completed the Spring 2009 clinical schedule. This new calendar represents an improved version of the online program launched in August for the Fall 2008 semester.
After four years of working with cumbersome paper clinical schedules and a one-year online schedule pilot, NEC launched its online collaborative clinical schedule with eighteen partners in August 2008. This project streamlines and simplifies nursing student clinical rotation scheduling. The online clinical schedule development was funded by a grant from the Northwest Auxiliary.
The benefits of this system include:
- It is stored on a secure server with a back up.
- All scheduling is done by an online conference call.
- Google.doc features a single spreadsheet for each hospital and then tabs for each nursing school and month of that semester.
- With this approach a Chief Nursing Officer can sign on and go directly to a secure “read only” page. The CNO can send a link or send the file for staff to store. The files are store and forward…more flexible and accessible. That way, a hospital can have files with all their information at hand – or go online and have access to the server database.
- Nursing Directors have pass-codes to change the schedule on the fly.
- It uses technology to reduce workload, repetitious entries and gains cost-effective, accurate and efficient clinical schedule data.
Special thanks to the Northwest Auxiliary for its financial underwriting of the schedule development and to the clinical partners for their continuing support to improve nursing education.