Mursing Blog

Well… yeah. Basically, that’s it. The semester is winding down, sort of, and with it things are getting more and more boring.

I’d love to have interesting, fun stories, but to be honest, the most interesting thing that has happened since the last update is probably related to the fish tank, so that gives you an idea on how amazingly boring things are.

I’m just going through the motions, doing assignments, reading texts and journal articles, learning.

Oh, on monday I’m going to see if the hospital I’m doing placement at allows observers, I’m going to try and pick up one or two shifts a week observing in the EMC or ICU, no idea if they do that, or if they’ll let me, but hey, can only ask.

Well, just a quick semi-update to keep things going.

Change of Shift is back in nursing school!; How I Spent My Nursing Education

Lots of good stuff in there, especially for students.

I think I figured out why this blog is pretty boring, it’s reflecting my life.

I mean, I go to TAFE, study, sleep, eat. That’s about it. I have one day a week of placement, which is pretty boring in itself, most of my day is spent doing tasks which are really in an AIN’s scope, with one or two “oh neat” opportunities if I’m lucky.

Frankly, this stinks, but there really isn’t anything I can do about it; I find the med/surg ward to be incredibly, incredibly boring. I don’t seem to be learning anything, I’ve done more bed-changes than my first placement at a freakin aged care facility. Last placement was OK because my facilitator made it good, but I’m still trying to figure out our new one. He’s good, but very different.

I think the main problem is just there’s no real acuity to the patients. They’re all stable, just pottering around waiting for discharge.

That’s boring.

I’m boring.

This is boring.

I want more.

I will have more.

Now, seeing as I’m starting at basically the bottom of the rung on the health care system, at least in Australia, and I’m still young (I’ve only really just turned 20), I have a long time ahead of me to continue my education.

Currently, at the end of this year, I’ll be an endorsed enrolled nurse, which can do a lot of stuff with indirect/direct supervision from an RN, which is great. But…

I want more.

As such, I’ll be (hopefully, fingers crossed) doing my Bachelor of Nursing next year, which, thanks to my EEN training, will become a two year course, rather than three years. After that, I aim to gain some obstetric, gyne and peds experience, and do the CRNE (Canadian Registered Nurse Examination), and start practising in Canada.

After that, I’ve got a few more choices on what I may want to do.

a) After I get a few years critical care experience, I plan on applying to a CRNA (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist) school, do my CRNA training, and then become a CRNA in a large, central hospital which has lots of traumas and other interesting challenges.

b) Again, more critical care experience, but instead of CRNA school, completing a flight nursing course, and becoming a flight nurse. I don’t know, something about the enhanced scope, the rapid turnaround, and the sheer acuity seems to be calling towards me.

c) Complete as many post-graduate qualifications as I can, and work in a large trauma center.

Now, I’m sure these will all evolve other the years, and they’re rather lofty (speaking as someone who’s never actually moved out of his home town, a move to a whole different country, let alone hemisphere, is a big thing), but the state of advanced practise nursing in Australia leaves so much to be desired that I feel staying in Australia would leave me… wanting, so to speak. I want more scope.
On the other hand, I could try GAMSAT after I do my RN’s and apply to Med School…

The following is an excerpt from my placement diary, on my first day of placement at an aged care facility, on the 20th of November, 2006.

I was taken aback by the disregard for gloves and other basic personal protective equipment shown by the staff, they regularly dealt with all sorts of nasty stuff and refused to use gloves, and then did not wash their hands. It makes me very self conscious to be pulling gloves out of my pocket while my partner for the day launches into stuff with an odd look on her face. Why is this?

Now, even back then I knew using gloves was going to be somewhat of an odd issue, in that the place that I did placement at used vinyl gloves, rather than latex/nitrile due to budgeting issues, but when I walked up to the glove dispenser, stuffed my pockets full and kept whipping them out for stuff that the other staff didn’t use them for (such as showering people, perineal care, wiping asses and the like) it certainly made me feel uncomfortable. Now, these were AIN’s (Assistants in Nursing, I think the US equivilent is CNA’s) that I was working with, but the AIN’s I was learning with at TAFE showed a much higher affinity for gloves than these people.

Even reflecting back on myself today, not even a year later, I’m reminded of how much I’ve grown. Nowadays, gloving up is a normal thing for me, and for the people who I do placement with. Gloves are ubiquitous, and my lack of confidience in myself to wear gloves while other people aren’t is gone. It seems like such a basic thing, but to me, it was a large issue, mainly of confidence. I wore them, but I was very uncomfortable with it, mainly due to the staffs seemingly blasé attitude to it.

Gloves are good, you hear!

I’d also be a much strong patient advocate regarding the situations I saw on that placement, with a lack of hand washing (the most important and easiest method of preventing cross infections) the main concern I saw. To me, a little EEN student on his first placement, who was I to question these AIN’s who had worked here for 20 years? The question now, is who are they, endangering patients through sheer laziness.

On my final day, I asked one of the AIN’s why she didn’t use gloves, and her reply was simple.

Gloves? Hah!

impactEDnurse is closing down soon. I’d just like to thank him for the continued flow of interesting, fun and downright wacky stories that end up surfacing there, and I’ll be following his writing onto WobbleWax.

Shine on you crazy diamond.

Well, yes, I have. I can’t really say it’s because I’ve been too busy, it’s primarily because of a lack of motivation.

Which is somewhat of a kicker, because one of the reasons for starting this was to keep me motivated about my education. Live and learn, eh?

Hopefully over the next day or so I’ll write up what was in my reflective journal (which was itself sanitized) on here, might be interesting.

So far I’ve had my aged care placement, which was 80 hours, my first acute care placement (which was in a private ward at the local hospital) at 120 hours and I’m doing a further 120 hours this semester. Just a little update for you all.