This year has been full of new and exciting opportunities for me as a nursing student. This semester was my first real experience in a clinical setting and while overwhelming and a little scary at first, I grew to appreciate and love it. I was even inspired enough by how much I loved clinical to become an SNA at the Wex. At the beginning, I overlooked communication and didn’t think much of it, but because of taking N2460 I have learned and grown so much in the area and I am much more confident in my skills.
I believe that one thing I have really improved on is my electronic communication. Since transitioning to online classes, I have had to utilize email and zoom even more than before. This has required me to really think about my online communication etiquette!
The last time I wrote about my clinical experiences and challenges, I noted that I wasn’t very comfortable using IHIS. Through both my clinical and my job, and even using IHIS learn, I feel like I have really improved. I spent a good portion of my extra time in clinical looking back at past nurses notes and charting and learned a lot about how they used the system. Given that IHIS is one of the main ways people in the hospital communicate with each other, having more confidence in using and navigating the system has helped build my confidence as a student nurse and employee as a whole. I can spend a little less time worrying about where to find a certain section for charting and even more time focusing on my patient and what they need from me.
I also noted in a previous blog that I was terrified when talking to nurses and worried about messing something up or saying something wrong. This added a lot of unnecessary stress to my clinical days and was really something I needed to work on. Understanding and coming to terms with myself that for the rest of my career I was going to need to talk to nurses and even doctors really drove me to work on this skill. I found that writing down/making small notes about what I wanted to say to the nurse helped me be more confident when actually relaying the information to them. This way I knew I had all of my thoughts together and thus made me more relaxed when having the conversation in person.
While I have improved in the area of talking to people who are “higher up” than me, this is also something I want to continue to work on. I’m hoping that my job will also help me with this skill over the summer so I can be even more confident when it comes time to hop back into the clinical setting next semester.
In my future practice, I would like to see more growth in my use of the different therapeutic communication techniques we were taught in N2460. I think a lot of this semester I spent trying to find the confidence to communicate at all with the people I was working with, whether that be my instructors, nurses, or patients. Now that I have this confidence, I am planning on focusing more on how I am communicating with them. With the multiple tools and references from class, my future communication will hopefully be more therapeutic as a whole.
I am looking forward to reflecting again next year after being in a couple different clinical settings and hopefully noting a lot of growth. I’m also hoping I’ll laugh at the fact I was scared to talk to other people in the field I love!