Two more weeks have passed by! We are on our second cycle of exams for all our classes, and my piles of study guides and notecards are growing. It's fun to see the concepts start to overlap and start to understand how all of the meds we are studying in pharm pertain to fundamentals, and how our med admin skills in fundamentals can be used in pharm. It makes memorization a lot easier when everything begins to fit together, but it definitely takes a lot of time and studying!
Week 5 was spent with one day in the hospital and one day in the LTRC lab. Going to the hospital for clinicals is amazing. The days are really long, but I feel like I learn so much by working with patients and shadowing the nurses on the floor I am on. It is an incredible learning experience, and I try to make the most out of every skill I can observe and practice there! In the LTRC, we learned all about IVs. We learned how to insert IVs and how to prime our tubing and set the rates for our medications.
Thankfully we had the mannequins to practice on for our first IVs! The procedure is not terribly complicated, but keeping all the steps in order and ensuring that the site stays sterile was harder than I thought! I got better at the steps, but it definitely took many practice runs before I felt like I knew where to position my hands and how to perform the procedure efficiently and without causing the mannequins to leak fake blood all over the place!
Wound care took up the second part of this clinical day. I never knew there were so many different types of bandages and dressings! We practiced packing wounds and irrigating them, as well as classifying pressure ulcers. We got to use some of the wound vacs in the lab and learned about different drainage systems.
During this week we also got to go to an acute care unit for geriatric patients. We didn't perform a lot of skills, but it was very interesting to see some of the meds we have studied in pharm being administered to the patients and see how important the fall risk protocols and DVT prevention guidelines are in actual practice.
Week 6 started in the hospital again, and ended in the LTRC with IV validations, foleys, sterile gloving, and feeding tubes. Our IV validations weren't as bad as the injection validations. We had to apply a saline tube to a mannequin's arm, going through all the steps of verifying the provider's orders, sanitizing the site, applying the tourniquet, inserting the IV, priming, taping, labeling, and documenting the procedure. It was just a lot of steps! The first time through I did almost everything correctly, but I forgot to remove the tourniquet from the mannequin's arm, so I had to revalidate. Thankfully I passed, so now two out of our three validations are behind me!
Weeks 5 and 6 were very full, but they went great! We're almost halfway through this semester...
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