The nursing home
My clinical really blows this quarter. It's in a nursing home where people are either not sick enough to be in the hospital (read: don't need vitals done, no acute illness) or are in hospice waiting to die. After spending a day there I've realized that the type of nursing that goes on there is exactly what I never want to do: babysitting or providing pain meds prn. That's not to say I don't like the individual nurses, I just wouldn't take their jobs.
But back to the beginning. My carpool pulled up in front of my house and my classmates and I talked about our purples (scrubs), purple people, grapes, barney and grimace all the way to the site. On the walk inside we talked about how our pants fit weird, our shirts were strange, the jackets, the shoes, etc. After all this talk about our uniforms, the clinical instructor greeted the ten of us by noticing that one girl didn't have her jacket (and was concerned that the girl's midriff would show if she leaned over in her t-shirt...not sure how that would work) and another had shoes that were the wrong color. "What do I have to do to make you get here on time and in uniform!"
We weren't introduced to the staff on the floor and got to know their names throughout the day as we got in their way or shared rumors with other students. The instructor had told us to answer call lights but the nurses didn't know that, so my introduction happened when trying to communicate with a nonverbal patient about whether he could get his hair cut and two nurses rushed in, told me to leave to they could talk to the patient, and then told me that they really didn't have the time to help this guy get his hair cut and I shouldn't let him think that they did. Yikes.
There wasn't a lot to do. You could see people in purple walking in circles around the unit all day. A couple were assigned by the instructor to play checkers with the residents. Another couple practiced taking vital signs on each other. We were told to go into the rooms, but around 1100 a rumor circulated that some of the residents didn't want to have anything to do with us. Not knowing which ones, we went back to wandering in circles. R reorganized the little nutrition closet and seperated the sugar packets from the creamer packets. I fed one guy. It was a really long day.
But back to the beginning. My carpool pulled up in front of my house and my classmates and I talked about our purples (scrubs), purple people, grapes, barney and grimace all the way to the site. On the walk inside we talked about how our pants fit weird, our shirts were strange, the jackets, the shoes, etc. After all this talk about our uniforms, the clinical instructor greeted the ten of us by noticing that one girl didn't have her jacket (and was concerned that the girl's midriff would show if she leaned over in her t-shirt...not sure how that would work) and another had shoes that were the wrong color. "What do I have to do to make you get here on time and in uniform!"
We weren't introduced to the staff on the floor and got to know their names throughout the day as we got in their way or shared rumors with other students. The instructor had told us to answer call lights but the nurses didn't know that, so my introduction happened when trying to communicate with a nonverbal patient about whether he could get his hair cut and two nurses rushed in, told me to leave to they could talk to the patient, and then told me that they really didn't have the time to help this guy get his hair cut and I shouldn't let him think that they did. Yikes.
There wasn't a lot to do. You could see people in purple walking in circles around the unit all day. A couple were assigned by the instructor to play checkers with the residents. Another couple practiced taking vital signs on each other. We were told to go into the rooms, but around 1100 a rumor circulated that some of the residents didn't want to have anything to do with us. Not knowing which ones, we went back to wandering in circles. R reorganized the little nutrition closet and seperated the sugar packets from the creamer packets. I fed one guy. It was a really long day.
posted by Imle at 4:06 PM
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