Practical Nursing Instructor

Nursing is like the military. It requires hard work, discipline, and dedication; a high tolerance for heartbreak; and a willingness to fight an insurmountable war: the war on disease. The similarities don’t end there, however, as nursing is also a profession that’s highly based on rank. At the top are Registered Nurses (RNs) and at the bottom are Nursing Assistants. In between, meanwhile, are Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs), who have less education and fewer responsibilities than RNs, but more than Nursing Assistants.

A Practical Nursing Instructor is a Professor who’s charged with training and teaching that middle group: the LPNs.

Employed by community colleges, nursing schools, and hospitals, Practical Nursing Instructors accomplish that with a combination of classroom instruction and hands-on laboratory work. Like any post-secondary Teacher, therefore, your duties as a Practical Nursing Instructor include choosing curriculums, planning lessons, giving lectures, assigning homework, advising students, and giving and grading exams.

Speaking of exams, your ultimate goal is to prepare your students to take and pass the NCLEX-PN exam, which is required to obtain licensure as an LPN. The exam — and as a result, your instruction — covers four areas: safe and effective care environment, health promotion and maintenance, psychosocial integrity, and physiological integrity.

Keeping those categories of instruction in mind, some of the things you might teach and train your students to do are: reading vital signs, dressing wounds, giving injections, administering medications, monitoring catheters, and assisting patients by feeding, bathing, and dressing them.

Thanks to the nation’s nursing shortage, your job, simply put, is: keeping the nursing pipeline full with caring and capable LPNs.