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I have noticed a lot of self-improvement throughout my clinical experiences this semester. I have become much more comfortable working in a hospital setting and practicing as a nurse. At the beginning of the semester I was nervous to work with patients and other members of the healthcare team but each week I became less nervous. As we progressed through our clinicals I learned how to communicate better with my patients and other nurses. I started to ask more questions to help my overall understanding of my patients, which then helped me to communicate with them about their condition or other aspects of their lives. I noticed that each week I spent more time talking with my patients and getting to know them, as opposed to doing my assessment or getting vitals and leaving. Since we only had one patient to care for during clinicals it gave me a lot more time to talk to my patient. One day I had a patient who was a recovering drug addict and had been in the hospital for weeks. I was able to spend a good amount of time talking to her about her life. She had not had any visitors in a while and was under a lot of stress because she was going to be going back home soon and knew it would be hard to stay clean. She discussed her fears with me, and I was able to help her think of ways to avoiding using drugs again.

In the future I would like to continue to improve my communication skills. Unfortunately, our clinicals were cut short and I cannot work with real patients anymore. Hopefully when I return to clinicals I can pick up where I left off and not start back at the beginning when I was nervous about communicating. My next clinical will be pediatrics and I will need to be prepared to communicate in different ways with children and their parents. When I start to take care of more than one patient at a time, I hope that I will learn how to communicate a lot in a shorter period of time because I will not be able to spend as much time with my patients and getting to know them. Overall my first clinical was very educational and I learned a lot about communicating with patients and other members of the healthcare team. I hope to continue to grow in future clinicals and when I begin working as a nurse.

For this assignment I watched the very first episode of Grey’s Anatomy. This episode is about the first day of work for most of the characters as interns, so there are a lot of flaws with their communication to patients and colleagues. For example, one intern, named Meredith, has a 17-year-old girl as her patient, and she gets a 911 page. Meredith runs to the room but when she gets there her patient is completely fine. She just wanted someone to talk to. This made Meredith very angry with the girl and she firmly tells her to “go to sleep and stop wasting my time.” Later on in the episode Meredith receives another page for her patient. This time she walks to her room and when she arrives the patient is having a violent seizure and soon her heart stops. First of all, Meredith never should have spoken to her patient that way, no matter how frustrated she was with her. Instead she should have explained to the girl why she should only page 911 if it is a real emergency. She also never should have slowly walked to the patient’s room, even if she did believe she was just calling her for attention, because something still could have been seriously wrong, and unfortunately there was.

There is another intern, George, who is having an even worse time communicating with his patient. His patient has heart problems and needs to have bypass surgery. The patient complains to him that he can never have bacon again and says, “just kill me now.” George then replies, “I wish I could, but I’m a healer.” After saying that the patient looks at him pretty concerned. A doctor should never tell their patient they wish they could kill them no matter what they follow it with. To the viewer it is pretty funny because of how awkward the situation becomes, but in a real-life situation that response would be very inappropriate. Later on in the episode the surgeon, Dr. Burke, is talking to this same patient and his wife about the surgery. The wife says that she is nervous about her husband being alright and Dr. Burke replies, “I’m very good at what I do, but still it’s surgery, there are some risks.” While this is not completely reassuring to the wife that there will be a positive outcome, the surgeon cannot promise that something will not go wrong. This response to the wife is appropriate to the situation and he does the best her can to calm her. George approaches during this conversation and after Dr. Burke leaves the wife asks George if everything is going to be alright. George replies almost the same way Dr. Burke had, saying he is a very good surgeon and the surgery is not very risky. However, as George goes to walk away, he can tell that the wife and her husband are still very nervous about the surgery, so he turns back around and promises them that they have nothing to worry about. This response is problematic because if something goes wrong, he lied to both of them. George is very proud of himself for saying that though because in the moment he was able to comfort them. Of course, something does go wrong during the surgery though, and the husband dies. After finding out what George said to the wife, Dr. Burke then makes George the one to have to tell her that her husband did not make it. While he should have done whatever he could to try and comfort the couple, making promises is never alright because there is always risk, as Dr. Burke had said.

In another scene, Meredith overhears a nurse question another intern’s diagnosis for his patient. His response to the nurse is “I don’t know, I’m only and intern. Here’s an idea why don’t you go spend 4 years in med school and let me know if it’s the right diagnosis.” This is not only rude but could be endangering the patient. Nurses are allowed to intervene if they believe something is not right about the care of their patient. When the intern walks away from the nurse he says to Meredith, “I hate nurses.” Meredith then says to him that there could be something else wrong with the patient, which is good because she is standing up for the nurse and not immediately dismissing her because of her title. The other intern replies, “Like I said, I hate nurses.” Meredith then becomes offended and says, “What did you call me? Did you just call me a nurse?” As a student in nursing school, this comment really bothers me. Nurses play a very important role in the healthcare team and being doctors who went to med school does not make them any better than the nurses who work just as hard as they do.

Overall, there are a lot of problems with communication in this TV show. While a lot of the lines said are to add to the entertainment and drama of the show, in a real-life hospital setting these comments would be very problematic and inappropriate. Thank goodness Grey’s Anatomy is fiction and mostly inaccurate when it comes to the world of healthcare.

So far, my overall clinical experience has been challenging. Being in the hospital and working with patients is new to me, unlike some students who have worked as PCAs. I was very nervous on my first day and almost passed out. Unfortunately, this made me even more nervous to come back and my second day of clinical was not much better. However, after 3 clinicals I am beginning to feel more comfortable in the hospital setting. The challenges I need to overcome now are remembering all of the tasks and assessments I need to complete in the day. I am hopeful that with more practice I can soon overcome this as well.

Communication has always been a challenge for me. I am very shy and always nervous to talk to new people. The biggest communication challenge for me in the hospital is communicating with my patients. I am not very good at making small talk and am never sure quite what to say to them. I also need to think a lot about what I am going to do while in the room, especially since I am new to doing these skills on actual patients. However, this creates silence and I do not want the patient to think I am being rude by not speaking to them.

To overcome my communication challenge, it could be helpful for me to observe other nurses and how they communicate with their patients and what types of things they talk about. By watching other interactions, I can gain a better idea of what talk about with my patients. I also think that getting more familiar with my nursing duties will help me to be able to focus more on communication with my patient and less on what I could be forgetting to do.

A lot of challenges I have in clinical have to do with my comfort level being there. Unfortunately, there is not a lot I can do to overcome this quickly because I need time to adjust and gain confidence working in the hospital. With time I am hopeful that my communication with patients will improve and no longer be a challenge for me to overcome.

This past Saturday night I was working at the RPAC as a lifeguard. I figured since I am already here observing people, I might as well use this time to take notice of different forms of communication among swimmers. Overall there was not much verbal communication. Most people just swim and then leave without speaking to anyone. If all of the lanes in the pool were ever full, I did notice the majority of people will wait and ask the person swimming in the lane if they can share with them. I have also noticed some people wait for someone to be done swimming, so they do not have to communicate. Very rarely I will see someone just get in the lane with another swimmer without asking. I also noticed that some people will sit on their phones for a while before getting in the pool. These are usually college students. Some will even keep their phones by the edge of the pool so they can check them. Most people do not communicate with others at the pool, and some even avoid it.

I believe most people do not come to the pool to socialize, but simply get their workout in and get out. However, there are times when people will come together. When I was watching the pool, a couple came in to swim. The lanes were not all being used, but they still chose to share one. Most of the time if there are open lanes people still take their own even if they came with someone else. This couple did not even speak to each other much, but I suppose sharing a lane was how they felt like they were spending this time together. A family also came in to swim while I was working. They did not swim laps, they stayed in the leisure pool and played together. There were some college students that also came to hang out in the leisure pool throughout the night. They would not stay very long though.

The most awkward encounter I got to witness that night was what looked like a double date. There were two college boys that were in the leisure pool for a while. Then a couple of girls walked in that appeared to know them. I assumed that these two girls were the girlfriends of the boys already in the pool. However, their body language suggested otherwise. The girls got in and sat next to each other while the boys continued to sit next to each other. They did not talk to each other very much. The boy and girl in the middle probably did the most talking, which still was not a lot. After maybe 15 minutes all four got out of the water. The boys got their towels and dried off and left. The girls then got back in the pool and stayed for a while longer. I can’t be sure if they had known each other before this, or if maybe two of them had met online and brought their friends with them to meet in person. If that is the case, I do not think it went very well.

From what I have observed, the pool can be a very social place with lots of communication or the opposite depending on the situation. If a large group comes in to hang out and swim in the leisure pool, they communicate a lot with each other, especially verbally. If someone comes in to swim laps, they tend to avoid any communication if possible.

Hello!

My name is Sarah Dishong. I am a sophomore at Ohio State, and this is my first year in the College of Nursing BSN program. I am from McComb, Ohio. It is a very small town and not many people have ever heard of it. It is about two hours northwest of Columbus. I am the oldest of 3. I have a younger sister and brother.  My sister is a senior in high school, and my brother is a freshman in high school. When I was in high school, I played volleyball and softball. However, in college I do not have much time for recreational sports.

Outside of school, I enjoy hanging out with my friends and watching movies/TV shows. One of my all time favorite shows is Game of Thrones. I also work at the RPAC as a lifeguard. I have been a lifeguard since I was 17 and I work during the summer at my local pool back home. I enjoy lifeguarding because, while it is not a very fast paced job, it is very important. Fortunately, I have not had to save anyone so far, but something could go wrong at any time and I always need to be ready.

I want to become a nurse because nothing seems more rewarding than getting to help people every day. After finishing nursing school, I currently think that I want to work in labor and delivery. I have always wanted to be able to work with babies, but I also think that the entire process of childbirth is amazing. Getting to be a part of that time in someone’s life everyday would be incredible. However, when things go wrong in that area it can be extremely sad. In that time therapeutic communication skills will be very helpful, so this course is especially important. I also plan to one day go back to school and become a nurse midwife or women’s health nurse practitioner. While I cannot be sure yet what I certainly know I want to do, this is my current plan. Only time will tell what I end up truly enjoying and doing every day.