Another great clinical day. It's really nice to be "on our own" doing assessments, providing care and documenting our work. It's a great clinical day when the nurse you are working with treats you as a person and not as if they find you completely annoying and a waste of their time. I haven't worked with all the nurses on the unit, but I think once you show them that your goal is not to waste their time or ask them tons of questions, but that it's because we ARE active learners...learning to be critical thinkers, learning to be solid care givers in the midst of a lot of first time experiences, then they DO respect the learning process and you as a student nurse. Now, I'm sure there are some nurses who just hate nursing students and can't remember what it was like to be a student...but I don't think I've met one this semester. Which is a really great thing for my first clinical experience!
I love it when I can contribute (and not simply lighten up someone else's patient load), whether that's discovering some new relevant assessment data or making a connection that the abnormals are side effects to meds/procedures, or discovering something that's out of compliance and finding a way to fix it. Those little things build trust with the nurses you are working with. And I think as time goes on, we grow in our confidence, have fewer questions and ask fewer questions, our assessment skills improve, our critical thinking improves, our organization of our time improves. I remember back to our first clinical day at the hospital and everyone was so nervous and anxious about doing head to toe assessments...and now it seems across the board we have all grown in our confidence levels. Now we judge our days on whether we got to do/learn new skills! That first day EVERYTHING was new and everything was stressful...but now we actually WANT new experiences! Amazing what happens in 8 weeks time. Sure, there certainly are days with challenging patients that require so much attention and bedside care that we wonder, how in the world would a normal nurse be able to care for this patient AND 4-5 more! Is this really what I want to do? One day I'll have a day like this and then have to be ready to show up the very next day to do it all over again!
Some other students have struggled with relating with some of their nurses and I can't explain why my experiences seem to have gone better. Perhaps the student's experiences with their nurses were different than what they expected and therefore they were disappointed. Or possibly it was just a really harried, crazy day for that nurse and unfortunately the nurse took her stress out on the student nurse. Or maybe the student nurse really was asking a low priority question during a high priority moment. I dunno. All I can say is that I've had really great experiences for my first clinical and I'm SO GRATEFUL! My clinical instructor is also very good. We all really like her. She's very interested in our progress and doesn't hesitate to hold us to high standards and to push us to improve and get better. My wish is that our clinical groups were smaller in number. Most clinical groups start with ten. We started with nine and have not lost a single student. Rumor has it that some clinical groups have lost a number of people (due to poor grades, life situation, decided nursing was not for them...).
Early on, clinicals were such a mysterious thing...causing great anxiety and stress...now, perhaps because there's much less mystery, I am looking forward and wondering what next semester's clinical days will be like. Next semester we will have clinicals 2x/week. The afternoon before the first clinical, we will get our patient assignment and we have to work up a care plan without having met our patient...and then we go to our first clinical of the week, care for that patient (unless they've been discharged in the meantime) and then we have a day to evaluate our care plans and revise as needed and then we go back again for a 2nd clinical day caring for that patient (if patient is STILL there).
This coming week we don't have to turn any care plans in...but we have to turn in a self-evaluation. Then we'll be meeting one-on-one with our clinical instructor at a later date for our final evaluation. Not a big deal... but I do want to find out what she believes my strengths and weaknesses are. If they match up with my perceived strengths and weaknesses.
Next week clinical will be a half day (since we've gone over our normal 6.5 hours on a few other clinical days) and then we'll go to lunch as a group. Yay!
Well, I need to sign off here and get some reading down for my lab skills class tomorrow. Didn't get it all done at my parents house. Was having to much fun!
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