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While Working On The Acute Medicine Floor At Victoria Hospital,

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While working on the Acute Medicine floor at Victoria Hospital, I have had many patient encounters that have allowed for me to reflect upon many aspects of the care I was providing. One particular encounter in which I found myself critically reflecting upon involved a situation in which my co-caring nurse and I were struggling to move an elderly female patient with limited lower body strength from her bed to the chair. For confidentiality reasons, this patient will be referred to as Rosemary for this reflection. Rosemary was admitted to the unit a day before I had the chance to care for her. Upon our initial meeting, I noticed that she was heavily dependent on my co-caring nurse and I to assist her with completing many of her …show more content…

I believe that this communication and encouragement was an important aspect of her care as it contributed to her no longer feeling defeated and thus her newfound determination to get up. Furthermore, studies conducted in the past have also highlighted encouragement as being an important part of patient care. Mayer (2014) discovered that if nurses are to improve the health of their patients, they must encourage engagement in personal care. In order to facilitate this engagement, she recommends that shared decision-making, patient-centred communication, and facilitating patient control over managing personal care must be included in practice (Mayer, 2014). I believe that I was able to employ these three recommendations into Rosemary’s care in various ways and thereby encourage her to preserve until we were finally able to get her up.
When reflecting throughout the time I spent with Rosemary, I was able to review various aspects of my practice and therefore come to the realization of how crucial encouragement was to her care. I believe that the encouragement I provided allowed for her to remain positive throughout a process that may have been difficult to experience both physically and emotionally. Moreover, after I finished with Rosemary’s care, I reflected even further on the importance of this encouragement. I found myself thinking of how encouragement not

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