Personal Narrative: My Clinical Reflection

After completing three weeks of my clinical rotation at HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital of Largo, I have found my experience to be not only educational, but also quite enlightening. I believe the true essential factors contributing to my experience included my clinical instructor’s guidance, as well as the other nurses and staff on my assigned floor. Through each one of my patient interactions and clinical days, I found them all helping me to better attain what was taught in the classroom by overall giving me exposure to real-world patient care. During my weeks at the clinical site, I made it my main goal to set out and achieve a clearer perspective of the every-day routine of a nurse, as well as to in general familiarize myself and to be more comfortable with simple duties we learned about in class. This in included but was not limited to: critical thinking skills, vital signs and basic patient care, medication administration, SBAR reports, and overall better understanding of the connection between pathophysiology and prescribed medications- to not only understand how to truly assess the patient properly, but also to determine any
For example, I did not understand why one patient I encountered who had a UTI- still had an indwelling catheter put in place; additionally, I also did not understand how another patient who was at HealthSouth for several months, eventually developed C.diff. while being there. When asking nurses assigned to these patients why these certain pathogenic diseases developed, they truly couldn’t give me a specific answer. Nevertheless, knowing proper safety precautions myself, I would not have let these extra diagnoses develop because not only does it create a prolonged stay, but also it further decreases the patient’s chances of getting back to a baseline health