Objective:Provide evidence-based clinically competent care. |
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Tacoma Lutheran Retirement Community In the Future... I look forward to the many clinical experiences I will have throughout the next two years of nursing school and beyond schooling in my nursing career. I can only hope that these experiences will be as rewarding and enlightening as my first experience at Tacoma Lutheran. |
Eager to Practice Our New Skills This picture was taken after a workshop we went to at UPS. The physical therapy students taught us about proper, evidence-based body mechanics and safe, injury-prevention techniques to use while transferring patients of varying degrees of self-sufficiency. We hadn't started clinicals yet, and were so excited just to be wearing our PLU School of Nursing scrubs. The UPS workshop was extremely helpful for me and I have been using the techniques they taught us and plan to continue doing so in order to transfer patients more comfortably and to maintain an optimal level of physical functioning myself. Links:
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My first and only clinical experience thus far took place at
Tacoma Lutheran Retirement Community. This satisfied my clinical credit
for Nursing 220, but it satisfied much more than that for my education. I was
assigned to the dementia unit at Tacoma Lutheran, which worried me a
bit at first because I hadn't had any experience working with dementia patients before. However, as I began to get to know
the residents on the wing as well as the charge nurse and CNAs, I
realized that this was going to be an extremely rewarding learning experience for me. There were only four out of the eleven of us assigned to Tacoma Lutheran who worked on the dementia wing, and I consider myself lucky to have been one of those four. Our clinical instructor had extensive knowledge about dementia and Alzheimer's Disease and did an amazing job making sure that we not only understood the pathology behind both of these, but more importantly, the best ways to interact with these residents. She was a great role model for me and helped me to make a clear distinction between clinically-competent, evidence-based care and task-focused, time-sensitive care. The wing was a community and a family that welcomed us into their home; some more quickly than others, but by the end of the clinical rotation, I felt attached to these residents and I knew that despite their diagnoses, they knew who we were and enjoyed having us there. I realized that the real test of clinically-competent, client-focused care is the client's response to the care. Although these residents couldn't always verbally communicate what they were thinking, their likes and dislikes were still clear. Reading body language, noises and facial expressions became intrinsic to my care for these individuals. This experience will stick with me not only as my first clinical experience, but as a time when I received the opportunity to better a community's quality of life with clinically-competent care and a dash of smiling youth.