Nursing Process II and Lab

Course Description

Nursing Process II and Lab addresses nursing care for clients and families during the prenatal, intrapartum, postpartum, newborn, and pediatric/adolescent periods. The focus includes promotion, maintenance, and restoration of health of the childbearing family and pediatric clients, and students apply these concepts to mothers, infants and families, and pediatric/adolescent clients within the framework of the nursing process. Clinical experiences occur in maternal, newborn, and pediatric settings.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, NUR is the Nursing prefix and the C suffix marks a combined course. Daytona State publishes this at 4 credits, offered fall and spring, with ENC1102 and NUR1230C as corequisites.

Maternal and newborn nursing has a particular character: most of the patients are healthy, and the nurse's job is largely to notice quickly when one is not. Childbirth is a normal physiological process that can deteriorate into an emergency within minutes, and the assessments that seem routine — blood pressure, fundal checks, blood loss, newborn colour and tone — are precisely the ones that catch the deterioration. The vigilance-in-the-middle-of-normality is the skill.

Daytona State does not publish a lecture, laboratory and clinical split for its NUR courses. The prefix's C-suffixed courses run at 32 contact hours per credit — NUR1020C is live at 5 credits and 160 hours, and NUR1005C at 8 credits and 256 hours, a consistent ratio across two very different course sizes. That figure reflects a course combining classroom, laboratory and clinical time, which is why it is far above an ordinary lecture ratio. This course is priced at that convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the anatomy and physiology of reproduction and pregnancy.
• Provide nursing care during the prenatal period.
• Conduct prenatal assessment and identify risk factors.
• Provide patient education across the childbearing year.
• Describe the stages of labour and nursing care in each.
• Assess maternal and fetal status during labour.
• Describe fetal monitoring and interpret basic patterns.
• Provide nursing care during the intrapartum period.
• Describe pain management options in labour.
• Provide nursing care during the postpartum period.
• Assess for postpartum complications, including haemorrhage.
• Recognise and respond to hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
• Provide immediate and ongoing newborn care.
• Conduct newborn assessment and identify abnormal findings.
• Support feeding, including breastfeeding.
• Describe newborn screening and immunisation.
• Assess growth and development across childhood and adolescence.
• Adapt assessment and communication to a child's developmental stage.
• Provide nursing care for common paediatric conditions.
• Calculate and administer weight-based paediatric medication doses safely.
• Support families through a child's illness or hospitalisation.
• Recognise and report suspected abuse or neglect.
• Apply family-centred care principles.
• Document care accurately and communicate with the team.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe high-risk pregnancy and its management.
• Describe neonatal intensive care at an awareness level.
• Describe reproductive health and family planning.
• Describe perinatal loss and bereavement care.
• Describe paediatric chronic illness and complex care.
• Describe health disparities in maternal and infant outcomes.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Reproductive anatomy and physiology
• Prenatal nursing care
• Prenatal assessment and risk
• Education across the childbearing year
• Stages of labour
• Maternal and fetal assessment in labour
• Fetal monitoring
• Intrapartum nursing care
• Pain management in labour
• Postpartum care
• Postpartum complications and haemorrhage
• Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy
• Newborn care
• Newborn assessment
• Feeding support
• Newborn screening and immunisation
• Growth and development
• Developmentally appropriate assessment
• Common paediatric conditions
• Weight-based dosing
• Supporting families
• Recognising and reporting abuse
• Family-centred care
• Documentation and handover

Optional Topics

• High-risk pregnancy
• Neonatal intensive care
• Reproductive health and family planning
• Perinatal loss and bereavement
• Paediatric chronic illness
• Disparities in maternal and infant outcomes

Resources & Tools

• Your clinical instructors and preceptors — the most valuable resource in the programme. Ask why, not just how.
• NCSBN (ncsbn.org) — free NCLEX test plans and candidate bulletins; read the test plan in your first term, not your last.
• Florida Board of Nursing (floridasnursing.gov) — free; the authority on Florida licensure, approved programmes, and continuing education.
• ACEN and CCNE (acenursing.org, aacnnursing.org) — free accreditation lookup. Check before you enrol.
• Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ismp.org) — free; its high-alert medication lists and error reports are the best available account of how medication harm actually happens.
• CDC guidelines (cdc.gov) — free and authoritative on infection prevention, immunisation, and isolation precautions.
• A drug reference you keep current — and the habit of looking things up rather than remembering them approximately.
• Your college's tutoring, counselling and disability services — free, and nursing programmes are demanding enough that using them is ordinary.
• AWHONN (awhonn.org) — the professional body for women's health, obstetric and neonatal nursing; practice guidance and student membership.
• Florida Department of Health maternal and child health data — free; state and county outcome data, including disparities.
• American Academy of Pediatrics (aap.org) — free guidance on newborn care, safe sleep, and immunisation schedules.

Career Pathways

• Registered nurse — SOC 29-1141; persistent nationwide and Florida shortage, and among the largest occupations in the state.
• Medical-surgical nursing — the broadest foundation and the usual starting point.
• Critical care, emergency, and progressive care — higher acuity, higher pay, and their own certifications.
• Maternal-newborn, labour and delivery, and neonatal intensive care.
• Paediatric nursing.
• Perioperative and surgical services.
• Community, public health, and home health nursing.
• Long-term care and rehabilitation — a very large Florida sector given the state's demographics.
• School nursing, occupational health, and case management.
• Nurse educator and clinical instruction, with further qualification.
• Advanced practice — nurse practitioner, nurse anaesthetist, nurse midwife, clinical nurse specialist; all require graduate study, and the pathway starts with an accredited undergraduate degree.
• ⚠ Be realistic about the work. Twelve-hour shifts, nights, weekends and holidays; physical demands; and genuine emotional weight. Nursing is valuable and many find it deeply rewarding, and it should be entered with clear information rather than on the strength of a recruitment brochure.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Postpartum haemorrhage and preeclampsia — the two that kill, and both are catchable

• The United States has a maternal mortality rate substantially worse than comparable countries, and a large share of those deaths are judged preventable — which makes this content a matter of outcomes, not examinations.
• ⚠⚠ The outcomes are markedly worse for Black women, and the disparity persists after adjusting for income and education. A documented contributor is that women's reports of symptoms are taken less seriously. Believing the patient is a clinical intervention.
• Postpartum haemorrhage can be rapid and is easy to underestimate. Visual estimation of blood loss is unreliable and consistently underestimates it — which is why quantification, weighing, and cumulative measurement have replaced eyeballing.
• Assess fundal tone and position, lochia, and vital signs on schedule, and understand that a young healthy woman compensates well and then decompensates suddenly — normal vital signs are not reassurance in the presence of ongoing bleeding.
• ⚠⚠ Know the warning signs of hypertensive disorders: severe headache unrelieved by analgesia, visual changes, epigastric or right upper quadrant pain, sudden swelling, and rising blood pressure. These can present after discharge, and postpartum eclampsia is a real and under-recognised event.
• Teach the warning signs before discharge, in plain language, to the patient and to whoever is at home with her — and tell her explicitly to seek care rather than wait, and to say she has recently given birth.
• Escalate rather than observing. Obstetric deterioration is fast, and the interval between concern and action is where preventable deaths occur.
• Know your unit's haemorrhage protocol and where the supplies are before you need them.

⚠⚠ Paediatric dosing is weight-based, and that is where decimal points kill

• Almost every paediatric medication is dosed by weight, which means every administration involves a calculation, and calculations are where errors enter.
• ⚠⚠ A misplaced decimal point is a tenfold error, and a tenfold overdose in a small child can be fatal. Always write a leading zero and never a trailing one — "0.5 mg" not ".5 mg", and "5 mg" not "5.0 mg". Both conventions exist because of deaths.
• Use the actual measured weight in kilograms, recorded today, not a parent's estimate and not pounds converted in your head.
• Have the calculation independently checked for high-alert drugs, and check the dose against a maximum as well as against the order.
• ⚠ Sanity-check the volume. A dose that requires an implausibly large or tiny volume for a child is telling you something is wrong — stop and recheck rather than proceeding.
• Children are not small adults. Physiology, drug handling, and fluid tolerance differ substantially, and adult rules of thumb do not transfer.
• ⚠ Children compensate then crash. A child maintains blood pressure until late in shock; tachycardia, poor perfusion, and altered behaviour come first, and hypotension is a very late and ominous sign.
• Listen to the parent. "He is not himself" from someone who knows the child is a clinical finding, and dismissing it is a documented failure mode.

⚠⚠ Medication administration — the checks exist because people have died

• Verify the right patient, drug, dose, route, and time, every administration, including when you are busy and especially when you are busy.
• ⚠ Use two identifiers and check them against the record rather than asking a leading question. Confused, sedated, and unwell patients will agree to a name that is not theirs.
• Check the medication three times — on retrieval, on preparation, and before administration. Look-alike and sound-alike drug names are a documented and continuing source of fatal error.
• ⚠⚠ High-alert medications carry disproportionate harm — insulin, anticoagulants, concentrated electrolytes, opioids, and neuromuscular blockers among them. They have independent double-check requirements, and those requirements exist because of specific deaths.
• Do the arithmetic and have it checked. Paediatric and weight-based dosing is where decimal-point errors become tenfold overdoses.
• ⚠ Question an order that does not look right. An unusual dose, an unfamiliar route, or an unexpected drug for that patient warrants a call — and the person who administers the medication is accountable for it, regardless of who prescribed it.
• Never administer a medication you did not prepare, and never leave a prepared medication unattended or unlabelled.
• Know why the patient is receiving it and what to monitor afterwards. Administration without understanding is a task, not nursing.
• Check allergies every time.
• ⚠ Report errors immediately, including your own. The patient may need intervention, and concealment converts a recoverable error into a catastrophe.

⚠⚠ Speak up — failure to escalate is a recurring cause of patient harm

• Reviews of preventable patient deaths repeatedly find that someone noticed something was wrong and did not say so effectively, or said so and was not heard. "Failure to rescue" is a measured, named phenomenon.
• ⚠ Say it clearly, say who you are, and say what you want. "I'm concerned" softened into a question gets lost. Name the observation, the concern, and the action you are asking for.
• Escalate up the chain if you are not heard. Every institution has a route for this, and using it is correct rather than disloyal.
• You may question an order. Asking for clarification about a medication, a dose, or a plan is part of the role, not a challenge to it — and the person who administers is responsible for what they administer.
• Students and new staff notice things precisely because they are unfamiliar. That unfamiliarity is an asset, and it is exactly the group most reluctant to speak.
• ⚠ Never let hierarchy stop you. The cases where it did are in every patient safety textbook.
• Report errors and near misses. A near miss is free information about a hazard that has not hurt anyone yet.
• Support colleagues who raise concerns. Whether it is safe to speak up is determined mostly by peers, not by policy.

⚠⚠ Licensure and accreditation — verify before you enrol

• Registered nurses are licensed in Florida under Chapter 464, Florida Statutes, through the Department of Health's Board of Nursing. Practising without a licence is an offence.
• Licensure requires passing the NCLEX-RN examination after graduating from an approved programme.
• ⚠⚠ Programme approval and programme accreditation are different things, and both matter. Florida Board approval governs examination eligibility; national accreditation (ACEN or CCNE) governs whether many employers, the military, and most bachelor's and graduate programmes will accept the degree. Confirm both before enrolling — this repository records the same unrecoverable trap for CAPTE, CAAHEP, ACOTE, CoARC, JRCERT, CIDA and ABET.
• Check the programme's published NCLEX pass rate. It is public information, the Board tracks it, and it is the single most informative number about a nursing programme.
• Florida participates in the Nurse Licensure Compact, which affects practice across state lines — useful to understand early if you may move.
• ⚠⚠ Background screening, fingerprinting, drug screening, and health clearance are required for clinical placement and for licensure. A student who cannot be cleared cannot complete clinical requirements and therefore cannot complete the programme. Raise any concern early and privately with the programme — it is far better addressed before enrolment than after tuition is paid.
• Licences renew with continuing education, including Florida-specific required topics.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Verify current requirements with the Florida Board of Nursing and NCSBN rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

NUR1423C is 4 credits and approximately 128 contact hours, offered fall and spring at Daytona State, with NUR1230C as a corequisite — the two are taken in the same term and the combined load is heavy.