Nursing Self- Reflection
I am having my clinical nursing community experience at Stein Senior Center, located in Manhattan 10010. It’s a center that provides a range of programs and services to help meet the needs of day to day long term independent seniors; in this place the seniors interact with each other, stay active while maintaining their health. They provided meals and other variety of choices for healthy living. The staffing is warm, engaging and caring. They also have volunteers and nursing students like myself who came to get experiences.
On my first day I thought I was going to encounter fragile, dependent vulnerable seniors who needed my assistance with adl’s. I was surprised to see this group age was very active and independent. These people were pretty independent with themselves and all that was needed were directions and resources to keep them ongoing; and all of these were accomplished under the supervision of our clinical instructor. I provided my services by monitoring and recording their blood pressure, medication teaching and medical appointment were reinforced, one woman brought her eye drop and I taught her how to instill it at the same time I reinforced proper hand washing, all of these were set in a pleasant and respectful atmosphere while maintaining client confidentiality .
Effective communication with diverse groups was key goal of client based teaching plan. I also took notice of non verbal cues shown by clients which provided me an opportunity for clarification while establishing an environment conductive to learning. In this good learning experience, I manage to help this people addressed their concerns through compassion and communication by listening to what they were saying. I was content for establishing good rapport which was one of my many goals. I further enhanced my learning experience by finding out all the resources available to this vulnerable group. My group and I educated them on safe environment and my presentation part was on medication safety. Moreover I also learned from them, by listening to them voicing their concern, I learned something new about myself, how to reinforce my counseling skills beyond medical diagnosis, most of the time we forgot our social life and the loneliness that came it as we are aging.
This clinical experience help me reaffirmed my responsibilities as a long term learner and also my social counseling skills as I continue my journey through nursing. I am more open to new ways and different approaches, I can see myself from different aspects advocating for my patients. My view of nursing prior to this course was based on hospital nursing. Now I realize the importance that nurses can have on community health if they know where and how to access resources for their patients or clients.
