Eek! Mini Care Plans

Care plans are the bane of nursing students' lives. Oh, I imagine they're the bane of nursing teachers' lives as well. We students have to do six of them during this 8-week rotation in Chronic -- that's 6 x 40 = 240 care plans -- and the poor teachers have to read and correct them all. At least they're "mini" ones.

Strange though it may seem, and contrary to what their name implies, care plans are never actually used to plan care for patients. Each day, after I've already cared for my 2 patients to the best of my ability, I must choose one of them and use my notes to sort of "back-form" a care plan for that particular patient. It's a beloved (NOT) nursing school exercise whose avowed purpose is to teach us how to structure our thoughts about patient care.

Here's how it works: we come up with a "Nursing Diagnosis," and then use this as the basis to 1) discuss what the patient usually is able to do for himself, but can't right now because he's sick; and 2) describe what the next steps in helping him back to independence might be.

So far so good. The hard part comes when we have to take this nice, straight-forward description of the patient's situation and crow-bar it into the weird and convoluted system of nursing-research-speak known as "Orem's Self-Care Theory." Don't ask. Suffice to say Orem is full of jolly little aphorisms like: "Human beings experience limitations in ability to engage in the inputs for self and others for sustaining life and regulating function."

???

If she means people get sick and can't take care of themselves I wish she'd just say so, for crying out loud.

First day back as Second semester student

In actual fact Monday was our first day back, but that was just for lecture. Mrs Beatty talked about chronic illnesses in general and diabetes in particular in Medical/Surgical Nursing. And Mrs Curry gave the Professional Nursing II lecture. Looks like a lot of the focus this term will be on the nurse's role as a teacher. Not my favorite aspect of the job.

But today we started back at AV Hospital, now old hands at the job; no longer wet-behind-the-ears first-semester students. It was my first 12-hour shift ever. I've often wondered why nurses do 12-hour shifts. Here are people who especially need to be on their toes, and they're working these exhaustingly long hours. But I actually liked being on the floor all day. My feet didn't like it, but I did.

I had more time to get things done, for one thing. And it felt more real, being there for almost the same time as the nurses (we leave a little bit before the 7 pm shift comes on), and getting to see the patients through the whole arc of the day.

I still felt crazed and overwhelmed and ignorant. But I remembered some stuff from last semester, and all in all it was a good day.