update on placement - learning and growing

Over the last couple of days I've learned a bit more about myself and my abilities. I've not really been enjoying this placement recently and found myself focussing upon the negative elements of it but truthfully it's been an educational experience.

I've learned that I can cope when I'm left alone to get on with things (left alone with 7 immobile patients who required full nursing care) and am learning how to prioritise which is an aspect of the nursing care that I felt I needed to work on. I also learned that although the counselling sessions I attended earlier this year had helped me sort some issues I had, they also provided me with some basic skills which enabled me to provide a support for another student on the ward.

We had a little bit of a negative experience earlier in the week. What happened was the other student experienced her first patient bereavement. A patient she had looked after quite a lot and had created a bond with past away early yesterday morning. It came as quite a shock to her because of the speed of the decline in his health.

She was informed of his death in a very insensitive way by one of the staff nurses and it really upset her but none of the staff picked up on her feelings. I took her to the staff room and we talked about it. She cried a bit and then I suggested that she ought to go and talk with her personal tutor (I had thought that I didn't have the ability to provide enough support for her). I spoke with the staff nurse and explained to her what had happened and that I felt that she needed support from her personal tutor.

Unfortunately the nurse was very old school and told us to toughen up and learn from it. She went on to tell us that when she was training she was left alone with her first patient who had died and was told to get on with it (performing last offices). In her day they had to just get over it and move on. I said that that wasn't a very good experience but that times had changed and students were supported a little more now and the expectations that were placed upon students then were different than those now. She then suggested that we were too soft and we needed to get used to death as it happened all the time. She went onto say that the worst kind of death is the death of a child and it wasn't so bad when an older person died as people kind of expected it. She said this whilst feeding one of the patients.

She appeared to have no feelings at all towards the patients or the student or any ability to communicate in any kind of decent way so we were left feeling really unhappy with her.

But today was different. We had the opportunity to join in with a few of the nurses and care assistants in a reflective session which was run by one of the lecturers from the college. We had a chance to tell the nurses how we felt about the experience and they were genuinely shocked that the student had formed a bond with the patient who passed away as they didn't think that this kind of relationship could be built up in the short time we've been there. (They've all worked there about 10/15 years.)

We reminded them that we were used to nursing patients for a maximum of 3/4 days and it was very rare that we got to care for patients for any longer than that because of the turn over in the general wards. Two weeks with the same patients for us was a long time.

Everyone had a chance to have their say; they heard our feelings and views and we heard theirs. We took the opportunity to question each other and learned a lot. I think that this kind of group, which encourages reflection and learning from experience, is wonderful. I feel that it helped break down the barriers that the carers, nurses and us students had created. We learned that the nurses do actually care and they received a reminder that although we are only there a short length of time we do actually get something out of it other than academically.

It was also in this session that I learned that I had actually provided more of a support to the other student than I realised which added to the feeling that this was a very positive learning experience.