Clinicals at Widener
This semester I have been very busy with my first clincal experience through Widener. Every Tuesday and Wednesday I would go to Cooper Medical Center for most of the day. I have been learning so much about nursing and how to care for patients. It has been a lot of work and very stressful at times and I could not have done it without the help of my clincal instructor. She was there for my clinical group every step of the way. This is not to say she held our hand the entire time. Clincals are a time to "spread your wings" and really take off. Sorry to sound so cliché. If your hand is held the entire time you will never learn anything because in order to learn one must take the first step themselves. You need to find the motivation in yourself to step outside your boundaries and tackle a new challenge. Although you remember the entire time you have your clinical instructor to go back to and ask for help or further explanation.
My instructor was able to pull much knowledge from her own personal experience as a nurse. She had many years as a nurse and worked in the ICU at Cooper. This was also helpful because she knew many other people working throughout the hospital. This allowed her to get people to come in and speak to our clinical group. One time she had the respiratory educator come in and talk with us about different types of respiratory equipment we might see a patient using. Another time we went to see a lecture given by a doctor on his study of hemoglobin levels and how that level determines whether a blood transfusion would actually be necessary. His findings were that blood transfusions may be given too often and that the benefits of the transfusion do not out weight the risk of giving the transfusion. As you can see the junior and senior year of nursing school are a time to really learn a lot and get a really good idea of what you want to do in the future as a nurse. I look forward to next semester where I will be studying OB and Psych at Cooper and Belmont hospitals.
