It’s ironic. During nursing school, it seems as if you have the most on your plate with the least time to accomplish it in. Yet nursing school is by far the best time to cram your eager, curious mind with as much information and as many clinical experiences as you can without completely losing your mind in the process.

One of the most important skills you can learn while still in the fertile, academic resource rich ground of nursing schools is patient teaching. Think about it – you have a school library, daily educational experiences and a school full of nursing instructors to learn from. And in your clinical rotations, you most likely have only two or three patients. This is the perfect time to learn how to accurately, compassionately and genuinely convey medical information to the layperson.

Believe me, once you graduate and are juggling about three times as many patients, you had better have a grasp on your patient teaching skills. As a nurse you will be expected to provide discharge instructions, pre-op and post-op teaching in addition to all the times physicians bring you into patient rooms to be on hand for some last minute “new diagnosis” teaching.

Once the physician leaves the room, you need to be prepared to handle the barrage of questions (and emotion) from patients and their family about what the physician just told them.

During nursing school, seek out community teaching opportunities outside of school. This could mean contacting local community centers, senior living facilities, churches or schools and offering your services as a student nurse educator. Even as a student, you have a wealth of valuable health information about common conditions and risk factors such as high blood pressure, stroke prevention, heart disease, obesity, diabetes and more.

Most community organizations will welcome your services, whether in a group or one-on-one setting and in the process, you are gaining invaluable “extra credit” in the patient teaching, public health and community aspects of your nursing education.