You Don’t Have to Love Every Placement…
The truth is something many student nurses don’t hear often enough: you don’t have to love every placement to become a good nurse.
As a student nurse, placements are often described as the most important part of your training. We’re told they will shape us, inspire us, and help us discover exactly where we belong in nursing. But what happens when a placement doesn’t feel like that at all? What if you don’t enjoy it? What if you count down the days until it ends?
In this blog, I’ll show you how to get the most out of a placement you don’t love and how to get more than just NMC hours out of it.
See Also:
How to write a Nursing Reflection
10 Common OSCE Mistakes
NCLEX vs NMC OSCE
The Pressure to Enjoy Every Placement
There seems to be an unspoken pressure in nursing to be grateful for every experience. Although all placements are suitable for student nurses, some just aren’t enjoyable and it’s okay to feel that way. Where you find interesting your fellow cohort buddies may think is the most boring place ever. I had a paediatric placement which I dreaded from the second I got my placement schedule but my friends at Uni were super jealous and got all gooey over seeing babies. Likewise, my friends really enjoyed community placements and although wound care was interesting to me, the thought of stepping into a house that had pets and clutter up to your eyeballs gave me a panic attack every night before my district nursing placement.
When everyone around you seems enthusiastic about their placements, it can feel uncomfortable to admit that you’re struggling or unhappy. I even wondered if I’d ever find a placement that suited me just right.
Social media doesn’t help. We see posts about “amazing teams” and “dream placements,” and it can make us question ourselves if we don’t feel the same. Even more annoying is when the group chat is going off and Becky who had an amazing placement last semester has yet again struck gold with her placement schedule and is posting ‘so grateful’ pictures on the cohort group chat. Eye-roll.
Disliking a placement does not mean you’re unmotivated, ungrateful, or destined to be a bad nurse. It’s what you do with your time on a placement that really makes you a good nurse when you qualify.
Anxiety over placements can affect your wellbeing – make sure you are doing something to protect your mental health. My Nursing Wellbeing Journals ensure a weekly check-in and monthly overview showing you the areas you need to focus to regain your wellbeing as a student nurse. Get yours now and start putting yourself first.
Not Every Area of Nursing Will be For You
Nursing is incredibly diverse. From acute wards to community care, mental health, theatres, clinics, and everything in between and no one is meant to love it all.
Sometimes a placement shows you exactly what you don’t want, and that’s just as valuable as finding something you enjoy. Learning that a particular environment doesn’t suit your skills, values, or wellbeing is still professional growth.
In fact, many excellent nurses can name at least one placement they struggled through — and learned from. I started as a Nurse Associate then did my step on to Registered Nurse meaning I had 4 years of placements and several bespoke experiences. I can count on one hand the placements I could actually see myself working in one day. More importantly, I learnt that I will never ever be a paediatric nurse, sexual health clinics are absolutely a no go and my patience is not made for outpatient clinics!
Next Read: Surviving Winter Placements: How Student Nurses Can Stay Warm, Well & Motivated
Difficult Placements STILL Teach You Something
Even the hardest placements offer lessons, although they may not be obvious at the time. When you feel like you are not achieving or learning anything on a placement it’s your mindset that needs to change – not the placement. Every second in a placement area is a learning opportunity if you really want it to be. You are surrounded by an entire multi-disciplinary team who’s brains you can pick and each placement comes with a different set of nursing skills for you to master.
If you feel you are on a placement in an area that you know you don’t want to work in when you qualify, you may feel like that placement is a waste of your time. It’s not getting you closer to your future dream job. However, you will be surprised how many skills you can learn that are transferrable to wherever you decide to use that PIN number when you get it. For example, no matter what type of nursing placement you get, you will learn:
- How to communicate with challenging patients or colleagues
- How to advocate for yourself
- What kind of support you need to thrive
- The importance of boundaries and self-care
- What leadership styles you respond to best
- What documentation looks like in different departments
- How to refer patients to different specialities
- What good and bad teamwork looks like
These experiences shape your resilience, professionalism, and emotional intelligence every one of these skills is transferable and all essential qualities of a good nurse. Even if you feel you haven’t learnt much, you are showing adaptability, commitment and seeing another part of a patient’s journey. All these things will make you a good nurse one day.
Download your FREE Confidence on Clinical Placement Checklist – made to carry with you on placement to remind you of those things you can do to boost confidence, stay organised and thrive on clinical placement!
It’s OK if You’re “Just Getting Through”
Sometimes success on placement doesn’t look like loving every shift. Sometimes it looks like:
- Turning up despite anxiety
- Doing your best in a difficult environment
- Meeting your competencies
- Asking for help when you need it
And that is enough. You don’t have to feel passionate about a placement to take something meaningful from it. You do, however, need to be passionate about upskilling yourself. This means finding opportunities not just waiting for them to come to you. Here’s what you can do to actively seek knowledge:
- Shadow a member of the team that isn’t a nurse (doctor, pharmacist, physio, specialist)
- Follow a patient from start to finish – the patient journey (good in surgical placements)
- Ask about workshops or training for nurses that you can jump on to
- Ask to be shown how to refer patients to specialities
- Navigate any safeguarding processes
- Look up the departments most commonly used policies
- Ask to sit on department meetings such as governance or MDT meetings
These are all things that will bring you extra knowledge that you can take forward to your next placement and make the most out of your time wherever it is you are.
Treat yourself with a placement gift – Nurse-Shaped Ampule Breakers are available in my shop!
Things You Can Do to Guarantee You Get the Most Out of Your Placement
There are many things that you can do to make the most out of every second on placement. These will keep you busy, give you motivation and keep you going when you’ve had enough:
- Come with an agenda – go through your skills inventory (just 10 minutes the night before your placement) and see what clinical skills you can get signed off. Let your placement assessor or supervisor know so they can support you to get opportunities to get these done.
- See the practice placement team in the Trust you are working at (they are usually based at the main hospital site) and see what further opportunities that placement or area has (these are the people at the Trust that support student placements).
- Speak to other students who have had that placement and see if there was anything interesting that they had the opportunity to do.
- Champion something – volunteer to be the student link nurse for something such as sepsis, infection control or wound care. This means you get to spend time researching best practice and teaching the teams on your placement. Teaching is a brilliant way to improve your confidence and knowledge. It’s very CV attractive going into an interview for your first nursing post (managers love this!)
Be brave and ask to spend time with a specialised team you have interest in learning more about. Your assessors and supervisors will be more than happy to release you to spend bespoke days with different teams. In fact, they will celebrate your proactiveness to gain further learning opportunities. Just make sure you give them plenty of notice so they can communicate with your bespoke team.
You’ll Call Upon Things You Learnt on The Placements You Didn’t Like
There are many placements I’ve been on that I thought were neither here nor there. They were okay.I didn’t feel I necessarily learnt a lot, but I got my hours ticked off and met some relatively interesting patients. It wasn’t until I qualified and expanded my nursing role that I found myself calling back to these mundane moments. For example, I had an endoscopy placement, interesting for the anatomy and physiology side but other than that it wasn’t my bag – excuse the pun. It wasn’t until I started looking at running my own nurse led clinics that I was able to audit DNA (Did Not Attend) figures because I’d done this here. Because of my auditing knowledge, I was able to identify barriers to making appointments (such as transport and mobility issues). I was then able to formulate a quality improvement project to increase patient access to a service.
So, every experience enhances your skills and knowledge even if you don’t fully embrace this as a student immediately, you may find it pops up years later and you’ll be thankful for that boring placement after all.
Next watch – How to build confidence on placement
Final Thoughts
If you’re a student nurse currently struggling on placement, know this: not every placement will suit you, but you can learn from everyone. Look for the opportunities to learn from the team around you. At the very lest you are chipping away at those NMC hours getting you closer every minute to that PIN number. And remember…. placements don’t last forever, they have end dates, and the next one will be better suited to you.
If you are looking for some more placement advice, how to deal with tricky assessors, learn to thrive in those 12-hour shifts and balance student life, placement and study schedules, check out: Book One: Beginning in the Nurse in Progress series which is coming soon. You can join the waiting list to get early access.
