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Clinical Learning Labs

Bridge the Gap Between Theory & Practice

Build your clinical skills

You read the chapter, take notes in class, and watch a video on Galen All-Access. It makes sense, you get it—in theory.

Theory is not enough. Nursing is a complex, real-world skill. You bring science and theory together as you care for patients in real time—watching, judging, taking action, and observing results.

At Galen, you build a bridge between theory and practice in a sequence of safe, supervised steps. You take your first step in the clinical learning lab.

Active Learning in an Encouraging, Engaging Environment

Galen nursing instructor and student in scrubs, talking with each other with simulation lab activities in background

Your clinical learning lab is a midway step between the classroom and a clinical site. As in the more immersive simulation lab, you will work with life-like manikins or patient simulators. In here, however, you focus on practicing isolated skills over and over until you do them safely.

You work independently or with a small group in the clinical learning lab—always under the guiding eye of an experienced nursing instructor.

When you know how to do clinical skills, your attention can move to observing, thinking, communicating with your team, and reacting to the clinical situation as it changes. You learn individual skills here that come together in your clinical experiences, simulation, and, eventually, in your professional practice as a nurse.

As you work in the lab, you begin to understand and articulate how to care for patients and why. Your instructors help you turn theory and evidence into nursing practice.

Your patients are a variety of infant, child, and adult male and female manikins. You learn how to provide care using the same types of equipment nurses use on the job. Take the concepts you learn in class and practice them repeatedly in a safe and secure laboratory setting.

In the clinical learning labs, you practice procedures you will use as a nurse, such as:

  • measuring vital signs
  • caring for a wound
  • administering medications
  • inserting catheters
  • setting up IV
  • interpreting heart rhythms and management

The clinical learning lab is where you build essential nursing skills and competencies. You may begin to feel your confidence bloom. Theoretical concepts start to click. What you know and what you can do begin to integrate. You move toward your nursing goals.

Galen nursing instructors and students gathered around a

Pulling It All Together—Safely & Among Friends

Learn By Doing

Find Your Galen Campus

Galen is expanding access to nursing education in locations across the country.

Map of Galen locations

Create Connections & Confidence

Female nursing student smiling at camera with simulation lab activities happening behind her.
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