First Year Nurse Practitioner Survival Tips: My Top 3
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As a new nurse practitioner, do you ever have the thought:
Is this what primary care is? ...what did I get myself into?
Almost every new grad has these thoughts, myself included. And it's completely normal.
(And I promise it gets easier.)
New Nurse Practitioner Survival Tips
In this video you’ll learn:
Your lifelines now that you don't have a preceptor
What to do if you feel like you're completely drowning
How to get support if you feel like you aren't getting it at work
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Liz Rohr:
Well, hey there. It's Liz Rohr from Real World NP and you're watching NP Practice Made Simple, the weekly tips to help save you time, frustration and learn more faster so that you can take better care of your patients. Today I want to talk to you about the top three survival tips for the first year. So when you were a student, you go from your preceptor, you go to see a patient, you come back in to see your preceptor, discuss the case and you get an okay that you did it right or a correction if it's not quite on the right track. And when you're a new nurse practitioner, you're on your own for the very first time. There's literally thousands of decisions to make per day. And when you're a new grad, those decisions turn into thousands of questions.
Starting with a countdown or starting with number three, number three is going to be your resources. So when you have questions and you don't have anybody around, like, is this actually otitis media? Should I treat with antibiotics? Or does this rash need prednisone? I'm not quite sure. Your resources are going to be the things that you turn to, to back you up. And you need to feel really good about them, you need to be able to trust them that they're really solid. If you don't have that, you're going to end up doing Dr. Google, which is not necessarily a terrible thing, because it might've led you here today. But it's going to take a lot more of your time to research, to find valid resources, and it's just not very efficient, especially if you're trying to move fast.
If you don't have these resources that you feel great about, I've made an ultimate resource guide for the new NP and it's at the link below if you want to give it a download, if you haven't already. It's my favorite resources that I use every day, so hopefully that is really helpful for you.
So number two is time. So what do I mean by that? So we all have 24 hours in a day, right? Backing up for a sec, my anecdotal research says that most new grad nurse practitioners start off with one patient per hour and you gradually increase the number of patients you see per day until you get to three months, six months, twelve months, if you're lucky like myself when I was a new grad. It would be nice if there were solid recommendations, but everybody's different, so what's really important about time is two things.
One, you want to do a gut check and see, are you completely overwhelmed? Are you completely drowning? Do you feel like you're coming in an hour early, staying two hours late, you're still working in the evenings, you're working on the weekends, you never have a time off, you don't do anything aside from work? That's probably a little bit too much. You'll definitely see some of that, but if it feels really like you're drowning, I would recommend talking with your supervisor and having a meeting with them. If you don't meet with them every once in a while already, maybe set up a time to check in regularly because they're busy too, of course. They're short on time as well.
But if you can set up a meeting with them, chat about, "Hey, this is how I'm feeling. What can we do about this?" And maybe they can decrease the number of patients you're seeing per day, or they can give you different types of visits, where you're not seeing brand new patients to the clinic every single day. You're seeing a little bit more of the more straightforward, simple complaints, UTI, URI, uncomplicated.
And then the other thing to think about that is that checking in with other colleagues that you have, because this is the first time that you're doing this and it's hard to know if that's normal. I spoke with a new grad a couple weeks ago, and she was telling me about her experience and she was at a full schedule after only 10 weeks. And I just, everyone's different, but I felt like that was too much and I don't think that she realized that at the time. So having that feedback can be really helpful.
Number three... Number one, excuse me, if we're going a countdown. Number one, the most important I would say overall is having a mentor. If don't feel like you have this at your clinic, stay with me. So what I mean by a mentor is somebody with more experience, whether it's a nurse practitioner or a physician that you can talk to with questions, ask questions in between patient visits. But also what I mean is that it's somebody that you can meet with once per week, hopefully for an hour, a more experienced clinician.
I had to ask for this. So when I met with a... I had to request that I could do this per the advice of another experienced clinician. And when I was able to do this, I could go through all of those nagging questions that I had that were just like, "Can I just make sure that this is something that you would probably do?" Or, "This really complicated patient, I want to make sure that I'm not missing anything. There are just so many moving parts."
And having the solid hour to sit down, focus and go through all of those things was just really life-changing for me and it really boosted my confidence. If you have a supervisor who's open to this, I would approach them and see if that's a possibility, whether it's with them or another nurse practitioner or a physician. A nurse practitioner would be helpful because they kind of understand the role transition. But physicians do as well, so either one. But if you don't feel like you have this, there's actually a few resources that I've found for mentors, seeking a mentor if you don't have it at your current clinic, including myself, actually.
So I'm going to be starting mentoring one-on-one, so you can work with me if you're looking for a one-on-one mentor online. For the rest of the resources, I've got a couple in that ultimate resource guide below if you want to check that out and see if any of those mentoring resources would be good for you. If you want to mentor with me, I'd love to hear from you. Also in the link below this video will be this interest list and you can let me know if you want to hear more and you can check out the mentoring page as well on the site.
So that's it. I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a comment below. What is the number one thing that's been most helpful for you so far this year? And if you're a student, what is the number one thing that you're most worried about that would make you feel better about going into this year? Did you like this video? If so, like it, subscribe and share with your NP friends so together we can reach as many new grads as possible to make this year, first year, a little bit easier.
And I mentioned it a couple of times, but if you want to hop on realworldnp.com, you can download the ultimate resource guide. And when you sign up for the email list, you'll get these videos straight to your inbox every week with a little note from me and some bonus and exclusive content that I just don't share anywhere else. So thank you so much for watching, hang in there and I'll see you next time.
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