Rosters and Shifts

Professional experience placements days and times vary depending on the clinical environment and PEP level. Professional experience placement times are based on shifts rostered to permanent staff. These may include but not be limited to early or morning shifts, afternoon/evening shifts, and night shifts. Start and finish times for shifts vary from area to area.

Therefore, students must confirm shift times with their clinical facilitator/preceptor/ or clinical partner to avoid confusion. Each of the levels; one, two, three, and four correspond to the courses respective year. As nursing and midwifery care occurs across a seven day roster, nursing and midwifery students must be prepared to attend any shift rostered during PEP. From first year, BNSc and BNSc-BMid students may be required to attend on weekends and be rostered across all shifts, therefore, students must expect to work a seven day roster across all shifts. All PEP days are a minimum of eight hours, excluding meal breaks which are half an hour.

Midwifery students attending the labour and birth of the women are required to work within their scope of practice and abide by the health service workplace health and safety guidelines. Specifically, the student has the discretion to work up to, but not longer than 12 hours to meet the needs of the woman. This 12 hour period of work includes all clinical work performed by the student on that day. A period of 12 hours of work must be followed by a minimum break of 10 hours.

As part of your professional responsibility, you are required to ensure that you:

• know your shift times
• attend all rostered shifts
• attend for the entire allocated shift
• are well rested before each shift.

Failure to do this is unprofessional practice and this means that you would fail to meet this responsibility. For example, it is unacceptable to:

• go from a paid shift to a PEP shift or vice versa
• work all night on an assignment and then go to an early shift.

Students are expected to attend the shifts as allocated by the facility. Students are not to renegotiate their shift hours while on PEP unless discussed with Academic Lead: Professional Practice or Academic Lead: Practice Integration prior to PEP.

NB: Students are required to regularly check the PEP Information on LearnJCU, The PEP assessment folder in the subject site on LearnJCU, and InPlace for updated Clinical Facility information.