Mursing Blog

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.

But I’m so busy

Maybe sometime tonight, lots has happened

It’s 2041, and I’m freaking buzzing, I can’t wait for tommorow!

So far the plan is get up at 0430, shower, shave, all that good stuff, should be done by 0445, eat breakfast (I hope I don’t wake anyone up), and then I’ll probably pack some lunch and sit down here waiting to go!

I have to be there at 0545, but to be safe I think I’ll get there at 0530, because, come on, who wants to be late for the first day of placement, really.

So far my bag is pretty empty, I’m not sure what else I’ll need, I have.

3x Pens.

1x Little Notepad.

2x Types of Mints.

Nursing dictionary and drug book.

My clinical assessment book, which I need to get filled out, and my placement agreement, in case I need it, and I think that’s about it.

Oh, and my stethoscope, name badge, phone and wallet.

I’m going to feel so naked tomorrow, I don’t know what else to take!

I should be going to sleep now, see you all later 

Huaahahah, I’m finished!

Sorry about the abysmal number of updates, but I’ve had a hard time keeping up with work, let alone blogging, so I guess this’ll have to do!

I’ve completed every assignment, gotten good marks, and now I’m waiting for placement. My car is getting repaired, the weather is awesome (we had an electrical storm yesterday, left dents in our freaking roof from the hail) and I couldn’t be happier. The Democrats in America are slaughtering the GOP, Bush canned Rumsfeld  and it’s overall a great time to be alive.

I’ll be sure to blog after every day of my placement, so stay tuned. It should start at around the 20th of this month.

Well, I’ve had sort of a rollercoaster of a week, going from good, to horrible, to good, and now hopefully it will even out to “tolerable”.

Last wednesday (the 11th) was our Anatomy and Physiology exam, and I was sort of… migrained out, if you catch my drift. But, anyway, I did that, and thought I did OK, and then on auto-pilot on the way home, when bad things happened…

Click for Picture.

Yeah, I had an accident. Good news is that it’s mostly cosmetic, and everyone was OK.
So the day after that, thursday, after getting driven to TAFE by my awesome mother, I handed my Health Care Plan in, which I think I did pretty decent at, and then went and waited for the bus.

An hour later (it takes 20 minutes to drive home oh god), the bus arrives and I get on to get to the bus exchange at the bigass (well, compared to most shops around here) shopping complex, where I proceed to buy a cheap copy of New Super Mario Brothers. (Awesome, awesome game by the way), and then wait for a bus. For about 45 minutes.

Anyway, so I end up getting home, and attack my car to rip that giant dent out you can see in the picture so it’s slightly less ugly and slightly more “not gonna kill someone”. Finished that at about 2100, went to bed, got up, drove to TAFE. It’s an ugly, ugly car at the moment, but the damage is actually quite minimal (from what I can see anyway).

And now comes today, where we got our A&P exam results back. First off;

I PASSED!

But it was a close one, which I expected, and I’m glad to see that the answers I got wrong I knew before we corrected them, makes me feel better about my knowledge base.

Next piece of assessment is the presentation about early stage dementia and maintaining quality of life and independance, if anyone has any links or reccomended reading, please feel free to drop a comment