Reflection of a Student Nurse - 05/08/13

As I am starting this post, we have 7 days, 15 hours, 29 minutes, and 15 seconds until the end of the semester courtesy of my countdown app.  :)  How fast has this semester gone!?  Seems like just yesterday that we were taking finals for first semester.  I’m not going to lie that I was looking forward to learning about public health.  Having several years of experience on a busy and exciting post-surgical floor of abdominal, vascular, and ENT patients, the idea of public health had absolutely zero interest to me.  To me, public health sounded like sitting at a desk all day with paperwork and phone calls - boring! 

However, as the semester progressed, the class opened my eyes to the job of a public health nurse.  It’s not just sitting at a desk all day.  Community health nurses play a vital and oftentimes unrecognized role in the community.  Using the public health wheel as a guide, the sky is the limit on what role they can play.  Public health nurses aren't just involved with a certain population like what I'm accustomed to.  They interact with with children, health care professionals, and community agencies.  They hold an important role in the safety, health, and education of the community.  Instead of waiting for the individuals to get an illness, they educate and monitor the community to improve their health and prevent the disease.  Many of these issues, we have touched on through lecture and blogging.

Just as with public health, I wasn't excited about the idea of weekly blogging.  I'm more of a "read the family blog" than "write the family blog" type of person.  I've tried the whole blogging experience and because I'm a perfectionist and spend way too much time analyzing what I've written, I made it much more complicated than it had to be.  Of course, the perfectionist in me is also a procrastinator and as the last person to comment most weeks, I found myself digging deep into Google most weeks to contribute new information to the coversation  :)  However, for once by procrastinating I was able to dig up new information that I would have probably never ever considered Googling on a rainy day outside of lecture.  

I really enjoyed the guest lecturer, Heidi Giese, and her involvement as a child-life specialist.  Her job hits close to home as my now 8-year-old niece Julia was diagnosed with a Wilm’s tumor in late 2010.  Because of her chemotherapy and radiation treatments, she missed quite a bit of school, creating many questions and concerns for her first grade classmates.  One of Julia's child life specialists came to talk to her class about everything that had been going on.  Her child life specialist , like Heidi, was able to explain some of the things that she had gone through using examples and pictures and made sure to emphasize that cancer is not contagious.  The kids even got to play with the gloves and masks :)

In their family blog, Julia's parents wrote “Children are taught from an early age that you can catch a cold or other illnesses from other people, so it's a natural inclination to shy away from someone who is sick. Another point that was made was that the kids in her class now know more about the things Julia has gone through and will be going through and that makes all of them advocates for her to other kids who might not know as much”.

Similarly, our guest lecturer emphasized on how important it is to "provide services that are developmentally appropriate, psychosocially sound and family centered".  The Child Life Program addresses the needs of hospitalized children which includes "security, comfort, acceptance, affection and age-appropriate activities" which are magnified with the stress of illness (Ministry Health Care, 2011).

Closing this reflection with now 7 days, 12 hours, 43 minutes, and 20 seconds left of the semester, I am surprised to say that I look forward to learning more about public health in the future semesters.  Although I love my current job and have a hard time thinking outside of the unit, there is more to nursing than working in the hospital.  There are many more avenues to helping people and providing care. I am proud to be a nursing student and have the option to impact so many lives through so many avenues.  :)

Good Luck with finals and enjoy the summer break!  

Reference

Mayo Clinic. (2011). Wilm's tumor. Retrieved from http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/wilms-tumor/DS00436

Ministry Health Care. (2011). Child life program. Retrieved from http://ministryhealth.org/SJCH/ChildLife.nws