Student Nurse Blog Week 13
November 17th 2004
Well, this week is going just as great!
On Monday I worked an early shift and was very busy in the medical section of our unit. I had my Intermediate interview in the afternoon with my mentor, the ward sister/manager. The intermediate interview is where your mentor goes through your practice placement workbook with you and decides how many of the competencies you are achieving, or working towards, or not achieving. Then they look at where you need to work more, how you have been performing so far and a plan of action for the rest of the placement.
I had every single item signed off with a ’yes’, except for three things. These items were things I had not touched on yet and included care planning and treatment pathways for a patient. The action plan was to address these three items over the next few weeks. My mentor was very impressed with me and very pleased with the effort and hard work I had put in as well as my ability to arrange time with other members of the multi-disciplinary team to gain further experience.
On Tuesday I worked a late shift. As soon as I stepped onto the ward I was greeted with madness. It was the worst shift I had ever experienced so far on that ward. I was on the Stroke Assessment Units (male and female) with one trained nurse and that was it. We had no Nurse Auxiliary or HCA. So we just mucked in and got on with it. The whole ward was busy and we had a total of eight patients transferred off the ward and six transferred onto the ward, we didn’t even get time to do the admission for two patients that were brought onto the SAUs, we had to catheterise one patient due to urine retention and the whole shift was just mad. I only had a fifteen minute break to eat my sandwiches and grab a coffee, and didn’t stop apart from that for the whole shift. I loved it though and learnt a lot. We all worked well and pulled together to support each other in all three parts of the ward.
Today I was supposed to do an early, but took the day off instead to see my GP, as my psoriasis is still not responding to the initial treatment. I will spend the rest of the day working on my case study and reading up on TB and Anaemia.
Tomorrow I have another community placement and am going to join a school nurse for immunisations. On Friday I have another community placement at a special needs group for young children. I am going back to Somerset on Friday night to visit some of my friends over the weekend and back on Sunday night. On Monday I have another community placement at a Health Centre - we have to do a total of 30 hours community placement time during our first semester and then another 30 hours during our second and third years. On Tuesday I have arranged to spend the day with the Nurse Practitioner from our unit (he is like a junior doctor and performs medical tasks as opposed to nursing tasks). Then on Wednesday it’s back to uni for a week and a half!!
I will update my blog tomorrow night and then again on Monday or Tuesday next week. Matt
Catch up with Matt in the Nursing forum
Subscribe or spread the word:
Related Information
