Not enough experience; too much theorizing.

According to my mother, a scrub nurse - or a operating room nurse by another name, the nurses that she receives aren't getting enough ground floor time. By that I mean direct hands-on experience in operating rooms. You know, the real stuff. Apparently they just "observe" and that's it; their curriculum does not emphasize on hands-on practice. They graduate within four years with that BSN behind their name without being able to do the most classic job of a nurse: assist under stress when operating on a human being. Newly hired nurses aren't given jobs as OR nurses (my mom, who gained her degree in the Philippines, was required to have such experience) so in the hospital she works at are forced to seek out older nurses.

UPDATE: As I read responses to similar complaints I get the feeling that the American system is quite different, or at least changed, from what my mom experienced back in her homeland. Confessions of senior nurses who were trained in the States imply that nurse training was more of a on-the-job type of experience, and that many newly minted nurses now the theory, but not the practice. Curriculum is partially to blame for this. American nurses that I've come across said that, if their program even have rotations, it's so quick that one is not able to acclimate to the surroundings in order to get a decent enough feel of the floor.

I greatly disagree with these nurses -

That rotation internship should be implemented in that four year BSN.  The profession of nursing isn't academia, so why the cuddling? Why the mentality of "Pfffft. They'll learn it once they graduate."? If that single hands-on experience was implemented I'd bet more nurses would "hit the ground walking" than "hit the ground standing like a moron."

Those are a lot of letters behind your name, Lindarn. My mom has one of those - RN. That's it. I bet she's a lot better at patient care - bedside and  surgical - than most who share the same mindset as Lindarn. Then again, my mom came from a program that was more practical, and her program was sought after by American hospitals that they had spots waiting for them when they arrived in the States.

There was a voice of reason.

 In reply to the voice of reason -

"We now have a more academic approach to nursing. I am not saying it is superior or inferior, I am saying that it is different." 

As I suspected. (Note: These posts were made in 2008.) 

This sounds exactly how modernists (aka useless-pieces-of-shits) talk, neither admitting one way is better than the other, just "different." Well, this isn't exactly art, so I'm not sure where the poster is getting at. This isn't exactly "one way of learning vs another" since nursing, at its core, was never academic. A good chunk, unless you want to be in academia, is hands-on experience. It's a professional job that really is the most "white collar" of the blue collar jobs. What the poster is saying is that, if a car mechanic goes through two years of schooling - learning theory and learning how a care is made - but never, if ever, touches a car to see and tinker around that it's neither inferior nor superior, just "different." To me, that mechanic becomes a "mechanic." No certificate or diploma can make you a mechanic if you can't diagnose and fix the problem when called upon. You're a fraud. Same thing with nursing and all "theory-to-real-world" jobs. It's absolute nonsense when a mission director says to an astronaut, "You don't really need to practice the landing simulations. You'll get experience once you re-enter the atmosphere. Plus, you'll have your entire career to learn it."

Nursing is nursing. It is not the same as engineering, geology or accounting. To the compare it to such fields is inane. The stress level is different. The atmosphere couldn't even be related. One is dealing with life & death, the others do not (engineering, maybe).

The poster also seems to imply that nurses back then, at least when the "more academic" approach was not practiced, were less knowledgeable on what medicine to give, the reasons why and how much, reducing the profession into a glorified Mary Poppins (without the magic) of menial tasks. That's weird - if that projection was true and that today's nurses are much better prepared and more intellectual than past nurses who did not go through four years of textbook learning, senior nurses wouldn't point out that new grads are "hitting the ground and withering around." She fails to recognize that the main gist of the thread was about the lack of quality floor-time. That one-year internship in an actual hospital would probably solve this issue.