Personal Narrative: My Clinical Reflection

After completing three weeks of my clinical rotation at HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital of Largo, I have found my experience to be not only educational, but also quite enlightening. I believe the true essential factors contributing to my experience included my clinical instructor’s guidance, as well as the other nurses and staff on my assigned floor. Through each one of my patient interactions and clinical days, I found them all helping me to better attain what was taught in the classroom by overall giving me exposure to real-world patient care. During my weeks at the clinical site, I made it my main goal to set out and achieve a clearer perspective of the every-day routine of a nurse, as well as to in general familiarize myself and to be more comfortable with simple duties we learned about in class. This in included but was not limited to: critical thinking skills, vital signs and basic patient care, medication administration, SBAR reports, and overall better understanding of the connection between pathophysiology and prescribed medications- to not only understand how to truly assess the patient properly, but also to determine any
changes needing to be made in order to give the patient the highest quality of care possible. Overall, I believe I acted in the most professional manner possible by making myself available to the staff if they needed my help, all while being a student and trying to ask questions and learn. I applied all my knowledge in every scenario I faced and I believe that it benefited not only the client, but also all the other staff I was working with. I believe all this to be true from my daily friendly interactions with the clients, as well as the positive feedback I received from working with staff on all different sides of the hospital. Over the three weeks I’ve spent so far working at the hospital, a constant situation I began to question was the start of all the nosocomial infections I began to see.
For example, I did not understand why one patient I encountered who had a UTI- still had an indwelling catheter put in place; additionally, I also did not understand how another patient who was at HealthSouth for several months, eventually developed C.diff. while being there. When asking nurses assigned to these patients why these certain pathogenic diseases developed, they truly couldn’t give me a specific answer. Nevertheless, knowing proper safety precautions myself, I would not have let these extra diagnoses develop because not only does it create a prolonged stay, but also it further decreases the patient’s chances of getting back to a baseline health
status. All in all, I feel positive about the experience I’ve had so far during my clinical rotation at HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital of Largo. I feel like I got to implement several skills we learned about in class, as well as others that I've read about in the book. I also feel like I personally could not have dealt better with the situation I mentioned in the former; however, it was a learning experience and something I, myself, will try to prevent in the future for my own patients. Overall, this experience so far has taught me not only basic, needed skills such as: patient assessment, wound dressing changes, bladder scans, using the glucometer, etc. but also more in depth nursing skills such as positive communication techniques and approaches for all different kinds of patients, productive team work, and prioritized time management and patient needs.