Reflection: I Shadowed Sam In The Emergency Department

On January 20, 2016, I shadowed Sam in the emergency department (ED), which was a great experience full of various chief complaints and patient interactions. Reflecting back on the experience the ED was a fast paced environment. I gained knowledge on how the ED is run, the role of a CLS in the ED, and how to chart on patient interactions. When Sam showed me how to chart she asked me what I would want to say in a chart note after a patient interaction, this triggered thoughts back to our introduction to child life course in respects to professionalism in charting. In this journal, I will focus on two patient interactions, each which provoked thoughts about future interactions and can be related to developmental theory. The first patient interaction I observed was with a 2-year-old female. At our initial meeting with the patient and her mother, Sam introduced the services child life provided. We got on the patient’s level and asked her if she wanted toys, she replied yes and continued to engage us in conversation by showing us a picture of a dog she had torn up. Sam then let me decide what developmentally appropriate materials to bring back to
I was not present during the knee reduction; however, the patient did not want refocusing. Developmentally the patient was in Piaget’s concrete operational stage, she was able to grasp what was happening and knew that she would feel pain during the reduction, the patient was also in Erikson’s industry vs. inferiority stage, she was able to show initiative by taking control of the situation when given a choice (e.g. deciding what movie she wanted, telling Sam she did not want any type of refocusing). One thing I am curious about is how refocusing would look for school-age/adolescent patients and would it have been successful in a case such as this one. I look forward to finding this out in later practicum shadowing