Day 2 OF cLiniCALs...

Day 2 of clinicals...
In the morning, did a shower assessment on this elderly assessment... it was quite uncomfortable for me and i think the lady also felt uncomfortable cos she's like showering while the two of us just stood there watching her shower... i cannot imagine how it would be if it's a male patient... peeping tom?? peeping andrea??? just weird... she managed quite well on her own and it was later found out that she was discharged just one hour after we did the shower with her... which according to my supervisor... is the aim of the acute stroke unit... discharge asap... which meant that we only get to spend little time with the patient, just enough to do an initial interview, review their ROM and strength briefly and that's it... we'll just refer them to some other depts... eith rehab or community OTs...

and my supervisor went thru the learning contract with me and told me that things are not as rosy in the real world as described in the lectures... where we learnt that we must spend time to get to know our patients... client-centredness... all the skills that we were taught like assessing ROM, manual muscle testing, PNF and NDT techniques... i was told today that we would rarely use them in real clinical practice...

anyway, i got to fill out some referral forms, initial interview forms and progress notes... and my supervisor actually filed what i wrote into the patient's file where everyone in the hospital can read and it would be like there forever... wow... it felt so real... like i was an OT already... my supervisor's also really nice and i found out that she's only like 2 years older than me... most of the OTs there are quite young also... in the afternoon... observed Rebekah my supervisor do an initial interview with an elderly man... it was quite funny cos we went in without looking thru his case file first, which we would normally do b4 going in to look at the patient... so i didn't know what was wrong with him, etc... and then the rest of the afternoon was spent reading thru more case files... so i was just sitting there reading and trying not to doze off again... and the weather these days are so nice... it's like clear skies outside and sunny but windy also... wanted to go outside instead of being stuck reading the files... a good thing that happened today was i made a new friend, Catherine... she's also one of the 4 of us at nepean hospital... she seemed like a nice person... but we'll see... like i recognize her face at uni but never really get to speak with her... we actually clicked off quite well today... :)