I have come to understand that in order for a student to develop professional nursing skills, he or she needs to have the ability to apply knowledge from theory into practice. This I believe is a fundamental key to the success of becoming a competent nurse. My practice and the invaluable experiences I have gained from my placement, as a nursing student, have enabled me to reflect on the dimensions of nursing practice. I can testify that clinical practice is really an essential component of learning process for any nursing student. My Clinical practice has allowed me to have direct experience with the real world of nursing, to practice the clinical skills required for the job and to learn about the responsibility of the nurse. Reflecting back at my previous semesters, I can begin to say that my acute clinical experience has served as a wonderful and memorable learning opportunity for me to practise some of the skills that I have learned. I had a lot of mixed feelings going into this clinical because I did not know if I was going to make a difference. And little did I know how much this experience would impact me. As I reflect on this experience, I realised that I finished my clinical not only with more experience than when I started, but with a different aspect of nursing all together.
In this paper, I will discuss an in-depth factual experience on my role in caring for a hypertensive patient. I will critically analyze my actions, feelings and strategies that I used to deal with the situation. I will also present how I was able to connect the knowledge that I had gained from my nursing classes and clinical laboratory.
Over the course of my clinical placement, I was assigned to different patients with different illness. Caring for these patients has deepened my understanding of the need to develop my intellectual capacity for good clinical judgement and safe decision making. While caring for these patients, I encountered situations that