Before I left my AmeriCorps position, my mentor, who had been a nurse
for over twenty years, gave me the sage advice to actually listen to my
patients because they are an underutilized resource in the field of
medicine. While they might not be formally trained about disease and
disease prevention, they are an important resource when gathering a
history and creating a treatment plan which will actually be successful.
Today we had our first real clinical day which meant we all reported to
the hospital at 7 am and headed up to our assigned floor. There was a
bit of confusion at first, and after being bounced around a bit, my
partner and I were paired up with one of the nurses who assigned us to a
room. While I can't get into specifics as to why they were there/their medical history I can say they were great patient to help ease us into our first clinical rotation.
All in all we survived our first day and thankfully no one died; one of
the clinical instructors shared a story about how on her first day of
clinical she was talking with a patient when one of the floor nurses
walked in and informed her that her patient had died while she had been
talking to her. She had literally talked her patient to death.
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