Week 1 Day 1

The first day we arrived at placement I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. All we were told was that for the first hour of the day we would be having a general orientation of the hospital and then after that we would go to our respective areas. It just so happened that one of the first places we were taken in the orientation was the reception, and we were shown the patient appointment book. I casually glanced at the book and saw a column with my name on it, and a patients name for 10.30am! I spent the rest of the orientation stressing about having a patient in about an hours time and having absolutely no idea what I was about to be thrown in to.

It ended up being one of the best things I've ever done and an experience I will never forget. Monique and I were each given a patient, mine was in the morning and hers in the afternoon. We were given time to research our patients and plan our treatment and the other person was allowed to come in with us for support, but not to be too involved in the assessment and treatment. I did a full subjective as it was a new patient and then went to find the supervisor where we discussed the findings and decided on an objective assesment that wold be appropriate. After the objective testing I was allowed to speak to my supervisor and discuss an appropriate treatment, and then go through with it.

I really suprised myself. Although my supervisor really cleared up why I was to do what I needed to do, I came up with the skeleton of the assessment and treatment myself. It was amazing to know that I could calmly deal with the situation. I would have liked to have improved the flow of my objective assessment but I feel that the case studies we did in the lectures and the practice clinical reasoning panels from 221 really helped with my subjective assessment.