Maintaining personal wellness

In order to maintain personal, intellectual, emotional, professional, social and spiritual health, we must balance those different aspects of our life.  I hope that I will find a good balance, of work, social, intellectual, etc balance.  As a student there really is no chance of having a well balanced life. It is very hard to not have a specific aspect of life completely consume you at times, leaving the other parts of your life forgotten which overall is unhealthy. When I am finally able to find a job, then become aquainted with what is expected and what I need to do to do my job to the best of my abilities, then I will be able to really be complete,  Having invested so much of my life into this career, i hope that I will be able to truely find what it is in this career that I have always been hoping for and this will truley be the completing of my overall wellness and happiness.

Maintaining Certification

We are to write our plan of care or action toward obtainin/maintaining our certification in our chosen line of practice.  I have chosen the ER to  be my speciality of choice so therefore my biggest certification will be the CEN which is the Certified Emergency Nurse.  I have heard that this is a substantial accomplishment so my primary goal is to gain the knowledge base that I will need over the first few months of working within an ER and hopefully obtaining this certification within a 2year time frame from when hired.  I hope that I will be able to get all the qualifications accomplished in a timely matter though if hired into an ER.  Classes such as ACLS and PALS are huge in the ER and will help me be the efficient nurse that I want to be. I will actually try to go above and beyond and certify in multiple areas if possible so that I will create a better knowledge  base and also continue to push myself so that I can value my job for as long as possible, and continue to love what I do.

Objectives/Goals

It is so important to have good communication skills as a nurse.  I didnt realize really how many people I would have to really get to know in order to provide adequate care.  In the ER there are many different physicians and they all like things done their way so to make care smooth, you must learn each doctors preferences. Communication is also important between co-workers due to things possibly being dropped from not communicating.  It is definitely a learning process to communicate everything.  I was good at communicating with my nurse but I would sometimes forget to include others when needed.  Another important part of communication includes communication to the patient.  Frequently they get left in the dark about their care and treatment plan.  In order to provide full care to a patient it is important to communicate with them and explain every procedure, drug and other treatments. 

When it came to my goals I tried to find goals that would stretch me to a new level of nursing skills.  Though starting an IV is something that doesnt seem difficult, having little opportunities to do this skill can make it seem scary and hard.  I had so many opportunities is the clinical setting that I have a great amount of confidence with this skill, and I feel that I can assure each patient that I will be able to do this quick and as pain free as possible. I also focused on being able to provide care from start to finish from one patient.  Due to some of the patient complaints being very non-complicated, this was a goal that wasnt as hard to accomplish as I thought that it would be. I did provide total care to one or two complicated patients but I did have to ask a few questions before doing specific procedures, I feel that I was able to accomplish this goal.  One thing I didnt really get a lot of opportunities to use the pumps.  I am unfamiliar with their pumps and how to use them.  I did have a few patients that we put on a pump but do to their acuity my preceptor just set it up due to time sensitivity.  Another one of my goals was to do a catheter without assistance on a female or a child.  I actually did a female child and many women, so I was able to accomplish this goal earlier in my capstone experience, and now I dont have to fear this process.  I am to the point where I feel that the whole procedure was done sterile and quick, and comfortable as possible.

I truly enjoyed my clinical experience and was sad to be done with my hours.  I gained friends and knowledge from this experience that I will definitely care with me throughout my nursing career.  I hope that I have acquired the skills that I will need to be a good nurse as a new grad, of course I will still have questions, but I hope that I can provide the trust patients need to feel that I am providing them with the care that they need.  I am so excited to be a nurse and I can say it is for sure the career for me.  I get excited to think that very soon I will be doing something that I love.

The effect clinicals had on my future nursing care.

In my clinical I learned that every nurse though has a similar education, we all have acquired different ways of doing things, and our personalities all differ immensely.  I have learned that each nurse including myself has specific ways we like to do things, and the things we say to comfort and ease our patients.  I noticed that some of the nurses did things that when i thought about it I dont think that I would have done. Therefore I can only imagine what they were thinking about the way  how I did things.  My nurse that I followed was so wonderful with each of her patients. I feel that I didnt just learn skills, I also learned to be a better listner and to find ways to show that I am truly there to care for the patient. I want all my future patients to feel as if I am there for them and that they arent just another patient to me.  I really want to be a nurse to help not just to have a good career.  I have always had the desire to care for people and make them have a happier healthy life and I hope that I can influence them in a way that they can have more faith in the healthcare system.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED.

My clinical experience was so awesome in aspect of learning.  At Timpanogos Regional they only have nurses, secretary's, and volunteers.  Due to it primarily only being nurses, we had to do all of our own tasks for each of our patients.  I rarely had someone to delegate to other than the volunteers, I frequently delegated room cleaning, and wheeling the patients to the car to them.  I really enjoyed having to do everything for each of my patients.  I learned fast how to prioritize and time manage due to the workload.  I really enjoyed the diversity of the patients that came into the ER, and the fact that my nursing care was not focused primarily on adults.  I learned many things from splints to the multiple cardiac medications that can be administered when busting up clots or preparing a patient for the cath lab.  I really feel that there was so many things to learn, and so little time to learn them.  I know that I couldnt learn everything there was to know about the ER in the short time I was there, but the nurse that I followed helped me learn as much as possible and I had a great experience. In the ER I found that patience and a caring attitude are very important.  Frequently we had paitents that were in for "pain management" if you will.  It was hard as a new nurse to really decipher which patients were truly in pain due to the amount of frequent flyers were coming in.  I only found out after my nurse pointed it out to me.  Overall I feel that I had an amazing experience and would love to continue learning in the Emergency Room.

First Clinical Experience

I am currently doing my capstone at Timpanogos Regional Hospital in the Emergency Department.  I chose this department first and foremost because I work in an emergency room, love the environment and atmosphere, and I feel that you get a great overall base knowledge of many illnesses and diseases.  I overall hoped to gain experience so that I can have a better chance of getting a job in the emergency department when I graduate, but also I feel that I can polish elementary skills of nursing and aquire skills that were not developed while in other clinical experiences.  I hope to gain a form of confidence where I can feel comfortable caring for multiple patients on my own, and feel that they are receiving adequate care.
So far I have completed three out of the eight required shifts, and I have had many different experiences.  I have definitely brushed up my IV skills, along with learning to care for acutely ill patients along with chronically ill patients.  I have had many chances to learn medications that I have never heard of, which I must admit is quite scary when you think about what these medications could do to the patient.  I have truely enjoyed my experience thus far and am looking forward to many more experiences to come.