Clinical Experience

Introduction This first clinical experience has shown me the importance of developing the nursing-patient relationship. Working with school-age children is a very different experience and requires a new set of communication skills that we have not focused on in class. It was an important step to being able to think on my feet and adapt to the situation at hand. These aspects have really helped me understand the unspoken traits of nursing and what will be expected of me.
Identify the Developmental Stage for Pre-school/School-aged Children At Kennedy Elementary, we worked with students who ranged in age from eight to nine years old. The third graders would be considered school-age children according to Erik Erikson, the developmental psychologist.
These behaviors included looking to their peers for the answers, even if they believed they knew the right answer. This was evident in all three of our clinical visits. During our interview portion, students would look around at other students and even listen in to their answers if they didn’t know how to answer a question. In the second clinical experience, the students were required to put a set of pictures in order from where you should start to brush your teeth to where you should finish brushing your teeth. When they did this activity, some of the students had the right answer first and then changed their order based on what their peers were putting, especially if their peers had a dominant personality. In our third visit, we did an activity where the students had a red and green sided paddle to answer questions. Again, some of the students exhibited these inferior behaviors by questioning their own answers if their peers had answers that differed. This showed me that peers have a heavy influence on students at this
The goal that they made for oral health is to prevent oral diseases that would prevent someone from living a normal life. They also hope to improve the availability of dental care and other preventative services (“Oral Health”, 2010). Healthy People 2020 acknowledges the importance of oral health and its relationship to having a healthy body when they state, “Oral health is essential to overall health. Good oral health improves a person’s ability to speak, smile, smell, taste, touch, chew, swallow, and make facial expressions to show feelings and emotions” (“Oral Health”, 2010). This coincides with the message we are trying to convey to the students at Kennedy Elementary. We even used some of the examples given by Healthy People 2020, such as when we told the students that our teeth help us smile, say letters, and chew our food. Healthy People 2020 has seen gradual improvements on oral health, and by the year 2020 they hope to see forty-nine percent of the population of people greater than the age of 2 having an annual dentist visit (“Oral Health”, 2010). With continued education on the importance of oral health, we can improve the quality of life for many