Medical-Surgical Nursing I and Lab

Course Description

Medical-Surgical Nursing I and Lab focuses on nursing techniques, communication skills, problem solving, role responsibility, and employability skills in selected areas of nursing practice. The curriculum addresses seven body systems: respiratory, circulatory, renal/urinary, reproductive, gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune disorders.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, PRN is the Practical Nursing prefix and the leading zero identifies postsecondary adult vocational instruction. Daytona State publishes this at 455 clock hours, offered spring, with a $252.00 laboratory fee and PRN0004C as prerequisite.

At 455 clock hours this is one of the largest single courses in this repository, and it is essentially a full-time commitment for a term. Practical nursing programmes are intensive and compressed by design — they take a person to a licensable standard in roughly a year — and the density is the trade-off for the speed. Plan employment, childcare, and finances around that before enrolling, not during.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Apply nursing techniques safely and competently.
• Conduct focused data collection and report findings accurately.
• Describe the LPN's role in the nursing process and its boundaries.
• Recognise and report changes in a client's condition.
• Provide nursing care for respiratory disorders.
• Describe oxygen therapy and airway management within scope.
• Provide nursing care for circulatory and cardiac disorders.
• Monitor and report cardiovascular status.
• Provide nursing care for renal and urinary disorders.
• Manage catheters and elimination needs.
• Provide nursing care for reproductive disorders.
• Provide nursing care for gastrointestinal disorders.
• Manage nutrition, feeding, and related devices within scope.
• Provide nursing care for endocrine disorders, including diabetes.
• Monitor blood glucose and describe insulin administration safely.
• Provide nursing care for immune disorders.
• Apply infection prevention and isolation precautions.
• Administer medications safely within the LPN scope.
• Perform dosage calculations accurately.
• Provide wound care and monitor healing.
• Communicate therapeutically with clients and families.
• Communicate and hand over effectively to the healthcare team.
• Document care accurately and contemporaneously.
• Demonstrate employability skills and professional responsibility.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe perioperative nursing care.
• Describe care of clients with multiple chronic conditions.
• Describe pain management approaches.
• Describe end-of-life and palliative care.
• Describe delegation to unlicensed assistive personnel.
• Begin structured NCLEX-PN preparation.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Nursing techniques
• Focused data collection and reporting
• The LPN role in the nursing process
• Recognising and reporting change
• Respiratory disorders
• Oxygen therapy within scope
• Circulatory and cardiac disorders
• Cardiovascular monitoring
• Renal and urinary disorders
• Catheter and elimination care
• Reproductive disorders
• Gastrointestinal disorders
• Nutrition and feeding within scope
• Endocrine disorders and diabetes
• Glucose monitoring and insulin
• Immune disorders
• Infection prevention and isolation
• Medication administration within scope
• Dosage calculation
• Wound care
• Therapeutic communication
• Team communication and handover
• Documentation
• Employability and professional responsibility

Optional Topics

• Perioperative care
• Multiple chronic conditions
• Pain management
• End-of-life and palliative care
• Delegation to assistive personnel
• NCLEX-PN preparation

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.
• Florida Board of Nursing scope of practice resources — free; read the actual rule on LPN scope rather than relying on workplace custom.

Career Pathways

• Licensed practical nurse — SOC 29-2061.
• Long-term care and skilled nursing facilities — the largest employer of LPNs, and an enormous Florida sector given the state's demographics.
• Rehabilitation and post-acute care.
• Home health nursing — growing quickly.
• Physician offices and outpatient clinics — better hours, generally lower pay.
• Correctional health, school health, and occupational health.
• Hospice and palliative care.
• Assisted living and memory care.
• ⚠ Hospital LPN roles have narrowed in many systems, with hospitals hiring predominantly RNs — which is worth knowing before you plan a hospital career on this credential.
• Bridge to registered nursing — the most common and most valuable next step; LPN-to-RN transition programmes exist across Florida, and the pay and scope difference is substantial.
• ⚠ Be realistic about the work. Long shifts, heavy patient loads in long-term care, physical demands, and genuine emotional weight. It is a real profession with a real shortage, and it should be entered with clear information.

Special Information

⚠⚠ 455 clock hours in one term — understand the commitment before you enrol

• This is close to a full-time occupation for the length of the term, combining classroom, laboratory, and clinical placement.
• ⚠ Clinical days are full days, scheduled by placement availability, frequently early, and not adjustable around your other commitments.
• ⚠⚠ Plan employment and finances a term ahead. Many students reduce or stop paid work during practical nursing programmes, and the ones who try to maintain full-time employment alongside this are the ones most likely to fail out. Talk to financial aid before enrolling.
• Arrange childcare and transport in advance for the clinical schedule, which is not the same as the class schedule.
• Attendance rules are strict and hours must actually be completed — in a clock-hour programme absence directly delays completion.
• Preparation happens before the shift. Reviewing assigned clients, their conditions, and their medications is expected, and arriving unprepared is a safety matter.
• The material is cumulative and fast. Falling behind in a compressed programme is very difficult to recover from — get help in week two, not week ten.
• Look after yourself deliberately. Sleep, food, and some time off are performance factors in a course with a patient safety dimension.

⚠⚠ 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.

⚠⚠ Practical nursing licensure in Florida — and the scope question that matters most

• Licensed practical nurses are licensed in Florida under Chapter 464, Florida Statutes, through the Department of Health's Board of Nursing, and licensure requires passing the NCLEX-PN examination after completing an approved programme.
• ⚠ Confirm the programme is Board-approved before enrolling. Examination eligibility depends on it, and this is unrecoverable afterwards.
• Check the programme's published NCLEX-PN pass rate. It is public, the Board tracks it, and it is the most informative single number about a programme.
• ⚠⚠ The LPN scope is defined by law and it is narrower than the RN scope. An LPN practises under the direction of a registered nurse, physician, or dentist, and the difference is not about skill — it is that independent nursing assessment and the resulting judgements are reserved to the RN. Practising beyond scope is a disciplinary matter regardless of competence.
• ⚠ Specific tasks carry specific limits. Intravenous therapy in particular is restricted for LPNs in Florida and requires additional Board-recognised preparation for the portions that are permitted. Know exactly what you may do, and never rely on what a workplace tells you is normal.
• Florida participates in the Nurse Licensure Compact, which affects multistate practice.
• ⚠⚠ 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.
• The LPN-to-RN bridge is a well-established route, and many Florida programmes run transition tracks for exactly this — plan for it early, because prerequisite general education can be completed alongside practical nursing work.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Verify current scope and licensure requirements with the Florida Board of Nursing.

⚠⚠ This is a PSAV clock-hour course — the published figure is hours, not credits

• The leading zero in the course number identifies it as postsecondary adult vocational (PSAV) instruction, measured in clock hours rather than credit hours.
• ⚠⚠ Daytona State's catalog displays that clock-hour figure under a heading reading "Credit Hours". That is a rendering artefact of the catalog software. The number is hours of instruction; the college credit value of this course is zero.
• PSAV clock hours do not convert to college credit and do not transfer as credit to a degree programme. Do not plan a degree pathway on the assumption that they will.
• What they produce is a workforce certificate and eligibility for a credentialing examination, which is the actual point of the programme.
• ⚠ Articulation agreements sometimes exist letting a completed certificate count toward a related degree. They are specific, they vary, and they must be confirmed in advance — ask an advisor rather than assuming.
• Financial aid for clock-hour programmes works differently from credit programmes. Confirm with the financial aid office before enrolling.
• Attendance is the currency. Hours must actually be completed, so absence directly delays completion in a way it does not in a credit course.

PRN0207C is PSAV clock-hour instruction: 455 clock hours and zero college credit, offered spring at Daytona State, with a $252.00 laboratory fee.

⚠ The figure the catalog shows under "Credit Hours" is clock hours — see the note above.