This clinical exemplar is a document that describes a meaningful experience I had with a patient during my preceptorship on a labor & delivery unit. Here I describe a patient experience and the lasting effects it has had on me and my decision to go into maternity.
Month: May 2022
My SMART goal for the semester involved studying pharmacology more by putting a hobby of mine with what I’m learning. I followed this goal for two whole weeks before I realized I didn’t have the time nor energy to fulfill it. I still wanted to fulfil my goal of practicing pharmacology, so I ended up purchasing a deck of flashcards that had visual and pneumonic aids on it to help with learning pharmacology. It was neatly organized by NCLEX topics, so I was able to go through the medications by category. The use of the flashcards took away the stress of creating them myself, but still allowed me to learn a lot. I wasn’t expecting to score as well as I did in the pharmacology adaptive exam as I did so I think the extra use of the flashcards paid off.
When reflecting on my experience with ATI and the use of remediation I did find them helpful. Stressful, but very helpful. I found that during my ATI remediations I got a lot of the same types of questions wrong (content). I also found that I’m awful at select all that apply questions because I begin to second guess myself. At the beginning of the semester, I was extremely stressed out at the thought of all the remediations we would be completing. This past month though, I’ve found that I’ve gain better habits in completing them. I’ve realized I need to break up the remediation into sections in order for me to gain anything from them. I found when I would crank out a remediation in one night, I wouldn’t remember as much as I would have if I broke it up. I’ve also learned through my remediations that I need to take my time. There were so many questions that I got wrong because I missed a word or specific wording of the question that drastically changed my answer. I found that I still made silly mistakes and were rushing throughout the remediations just because of the stress of everything else around me.
This semester I feel like I’ve learned a lot of test taking strategies and have narrowed down topics in which I need to focus on more than others in preparation in taking the NCLEX. Pharmacology and mental health are still the two topics that I need to do the most review on. Beyond the NCLEX, I’ve learned many useful skills that will help me in my future career. For example, I need to trust my gut and not second guess myself. When I second guess myself that’s when I usually do the wrong thing. My time here in the UNE nursing program, along with this course, has reinstated my lifelong problem of that procrastination only causes more stress. This will be helpful when I’m practicing as a nurse with things like charting and keeping on top of tasks. I’m excited to be going into a career in which the learning never ends.
Coming into gerontology, to be honest, I wasn’t too excited. Growing up you hear about how awful it is to get older and it made me decided early on that older adults aren’t the population I wanted to be working with. I didn’t really have a big change in heart regarding this population until we had our two guest speakers come to class and talk with us. That day was a major turning point for me and made me more open to work with older populations. It also made me reflect on how I react, behave, and interact with older adults. They gave me the insight I needed to change my views and to not look at older individuals as weak or fragile.
After that once class, on my drive home, I reflected on how I thought of my grandparents. It made me realize how much more capable they were than I thought. I was always so quick to open something or grab something off the floor for them because I thought I was helping them. Little did I know I was actually hurting them by not allowing their body to move in such a way. Since then, I’ve allowed the older adults to attempt first, then ask for help. Rather than assuming they need my help.
Another major turning point for me was the LifeBook project. I was fortunate enough to interview one of my grandmothers. A year ago, my other grandmother passed and after her passing I realized how little I knew about her outside of her being a mother and memere. The LifeBook gave me an opportunity to learn things about my gram that I didn’t know or even know how to ask. I was grateful for the opportunity to learn more about my grandmother because without this project, both her and I, probably would have never found the time to sit down and talk the way we did during that interview. Even though it was my grandmother, I felt I was learning just as many new things about her as my partner. The project gave me tools to help better work with the populations of older adults.
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