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
The following essay is a reflective account on an event that I, a student nurse encountered whilst on my first clinical placement in my first year of study. The event took place in a nursing home. All names have been changed to protect the confidentiality of the patient (NMC, 2008).
In Bed Number Ten, Sue Baier shares her first-hand account of both her painful experiences and her lengthy recovery in the ICU setting. She was struck with the disabling effects of Guillain-Barre syndrome which resulted in her being admitted into an Intensive Care Unit. While there, her communication and mobility was very limited and made it very difficult for many of the staff to passionately and effectively take care of her. She describes multiple accounts of nurses and staff who were task oriented and failed to meet her physical and emotion needs. Her sense of isolation and inhumane treatment transpires from the pages to the heart of the reader. However, in the book, we observe a few staff that were sensitive to her condition and took care of her the way a person should be taken care of. Sue’s hardship and experience is one of perseverance in her time in the ICU and gives an outlook of how to be sensitive to critical care patients, as it should be.
The purpose of this essay is to reflect on my personal role in the inter-professional team and the delivery of healthcare that I have encountered during my duty as a health care assistant in one of the hospitals here in England. In accordance with the NMC (2002) Code of professional conduct, confidentiality shall be maintained and all names have been changed to protect identity. The purpose of reflection as stated by John's (1995) is to promote desirable practice through the practitioner's understanding and learning about his/her lived experiences. I have decided to reflect upon an incident with the nurse in charge in one of my shifts and in order to structure my reflection I
Throughout my clinical experiences, there have been quite a few circumstances I have been placed in that have remained with me whether good or bad. All of them have been learning experiences for me whether it is how to improve and to do better next time from a mistake, for me to learn that this is or is not how a patient should be treated, how to handle family situations, and many others. One experience that I was able to participate in that will remain with me because I had not experienced this before was during my critical care rotation in the fall of 2015. This patient was dying and we were implementing comfort care for him.
For my interview, I spoke with one of the Nurse Practitioners (NP) that I interact with while working my shift at the hospital. I will call her Terri Smith because although I asked to use her quotes in my paper, I did not think to ask for permission to use her actual name. Where I work, many of our internal medicine physicians are hospitalists. During the night, they are covered by the umbrella of Quest Care. There are several NPs that work under the afore mentioned physicians and are there, on-call, when needed for their clinical expertise. It is nice, because even though I can’t develop much of a relationship with the doctors whose patients I work so hard to take care of, I get to have the opportunity to grow strong bonds with the NPs that I see almost every shift.
First of all, I recognized that I was dealing with humans, and not just dealing with a disease process and application of the nursing process in the aspect of restoring patient health. I was dealing with emotions, and families, and cultural beliefs that influenced individual’s aspects of care. I started to see that health did not just incorporate healing the disease, but also recognized the importance of making sure patient’s felt that their
The aim of this reflection is to discuss patient safety in an acute setting according to the Scottish Patient Safety Programme. I will be using a model of reflection, Gibbs Reflective Cycle to structure my essay (Gibbs 1988 cited in Paterson and Chapman, 2013). In accordance with the Nursing and Midwifery Council identifiable information will not be written, maintaining confidentiality (NMC, 2010a).
The following essay is a reflective account on an event that I, a student nurse encountered whilst on my second clinical placement in my first year of study. The event took place in a Fountain Nursing Home in Granite City. I have chosen to give thought to the event described in this essay as I feel that it highlights the need for nurses to have effective communication skills especially when treating patients that are suffering with a mental illness. Upon arriving to the Nursing home for the second time on Thursday November 14,2013; assigned the same patient as before. On meeting my patient the first thing I noticed myself doing without even thinking about it was giving her a visual inspection. Before nursing school I never really looked at
This is a reflective essay based on a situation encountered during my first six-week placement on an ear, nose and throat ward at a local hospital. In order that I could use this situation for my reflection the patient will be referred to as "Mr H". This is in order that his real name is protected and that confidentially maintained in line with the NMC Code of Professional Conduct to
Lily had only recently began dialysis treatment, and her unwillingness to proceed with treatment would have resulted in her care becoming palliative, something the healthcare professional did not think was suitable at this point in her illness trajectory. Tait (2012) points out that a critically ill patient experiences not only physiological trauma, but also psychological trauma. This psychological trauma that can be experienced after critical care has been addressed by the National Outreach Forum (2003) who suggested that services should be developed to address the implications of critical illness. Samuelson (2011) suggests that any negative emotions associated with critical care can be counterbalanced with memories that reinforce safety, control and trust. This is a useful point to consider in Lily case, who fortunately had the time to talk through her worries concerning continual dialysis treatment with the staff on the ward, who were able to convince her she was in the safest possible hands and that continuing her dialysis treatment would be the best option.
I reflected upon which experience to use in meeting my learning objectives while engaging with patients. Therefore, I identified supporting Margaret with her personal care as one of my learning objectives. I then discussed this with my mentor who agreed to support me with this.
The first stage of this framework is coming to know the client, which requires the nurse to understand that the personal meaning of health and healing is individualized and the context of this area is highly subjective. Gillespie and Paterson (2009) state that “clinical decision-making processes are triggered by recognition of a cue from a patient” (p. 167). In the case of this patient, the decision was based off a cue; a change
Something I learned from Denise was as a nurse, it is rewarding to not only stay with patients until their last breathe, but also teaching other nurses what you already learned. They
My supervisor, one of the head nurses, hurriedly pulled me to the corner of the bleach white hospital room and directed me to put on gloves, an eye mask, and a face mask. I felt as if I was preparing for war as I put on all of the required gear. The sound of expensive shoes click-clacked down the hallway indicating the arrival of two doctors who rushed into the room and shouted out orders to the staff while pulling the doors to the room shut along with the curtains. Two doctors, eight nurses, an intern, and a dying patient squeezed into the already claustrophobic ten by fifteen-foot room. The machine monitoring the patient’s vital signs continued to beep incessantly as my heart rate accelerated. Throughout my internship, I had never seen a patient in critical condition until that moment. I remembered my teacher’s advice if we were ever in a situation such as this: take a few deep breaths and sit down if you feel like you’re going to pass out. In that
The case that I have chosen to reflect on was a patient that was already staying on a ward within the hospital, the patient was rushed to the emergency theatre late at night from the ward with a suspected internal bleed, the cause and exact location of the bleed was unknown, the patient presented a complex case for the theatre staff as the patient 's condition was largely unpredictable along with the amount of blood loss that the patient could lose. My role within the theatre team was on the anaesthetic side, I was supported by my mentor who I feel I have learned a vast amount of