The Dynamic Duo

I survived my second Hospital Clinical, and my first as student nurse largely in charge of my own patient! Here’s how it works: the actual hours at the hospital are from 6:30 AM to 12:00 PM. If it’s your day, you show up at the hospital the day before between 3 and 5 pm to ‘get your patient.’ It puzzled me when I first heard the term: do we take the patient home for a trial run? Do we play practical jokes on the patient and yell “Gotcha!”?
Or maybe just start building that important nurse-patient relationship….
Actually none of the above. “Getting your patient” means you look at the yellow paper in the nurse’s break room and see what patient you will be assigned to. Then you look through several different charts and write down….. well, if you’re me you write down everything you can decipher (which includes pretty much nothing from the physician’s notes.) In particular, you write down why this poor guy is in the hospital, what meds he’s taking, what therapies have been ordered, results of labs. There is NO patient contact at this time. Then you go home, research all the medications and why he’s taking them, research his disease process and what things nurses can do to make it better, and try to come up with some dang nursing diagnoses.
Our group was the pilot group, and 2 hours before our very first get-your-patient time, we got some startling news. There might not be enough patients to go around; the hospital census was low right now. If necessary, some of MAY have to be ‘team leaders’ or just go around and help other people with THEIR patients. Sure enough, half-way through Pharmacology Class, we got an announcement: Kathy and Adriana go see Heidi (one of our instructors) after class. We were going to be team leaders, while the other 7 students were assigned to a patient.
Even though we didn’t have to, I went to the hospital and ‘helped’ Kim gather info on her patient. I was rather disappointed and wanted to learn all I could and have as much of the clinical experience as I could muster. Also, Kim was my ride; I wasn’t goin’ nowhere til she was ready! While we were there and all had charts pulled out, we heard a ‘code blue’ for room 223 go out on the loudspeaker. Suddenly, Monica didn’t have a patient either!
At the hospital the next day, I really wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing. I ended up checking meds for Monica (who got a newly admitted patient the next AM), fetching iced water and making beds. The highlight of the day was getting to give flu and pneumonia shots to a woman in the hospital, under strict observation of the nurse, of course. It wasn’t nearly as scary as I though it would be.
So, for Clinical #2, Adriana and I were pretty much guaranteed to have a patient. And again we ended up with 2 team leaders; Melissa and Charity. I had the perfect patient for my first day. He had had surgery for prostate cancer and was recovering nicely. I got to take his IV out, do a physical assessment on him and give him his oral meds. I had a slight mishap there, as one of his pills leaped over the table and skittered under his bed when I attempted to remove it from its foil backed enclosure. Charity had to call the Pharmacy and get me another one! I was able to be there when his doctor came in, and help out with his discharge instructions. Yep, he got to go home, which made him very happy.
So though I have a lot to learn, I am happy that my first day went as well as it did. Hopefully next time even better, and hopefully next time I will do better on my assessment and documentation. Really, Heidi, I promise.