Reflective Journal Older Adult Cedar Hills Langley Student Name Dermot Connolly Stenberg College

Tuesday Aug 21st 2012 I began my first day of the week giving personal care to Joan on C wing in bed 20C. I had asked one of the care aids if they needed a hand with any of the patients and they suggested I wash and change Joan. My experience with personal care is quiet limited so I was quiet nervous. When I learned that I would also be changing Joan while she remained in bed, I was even more nervous. I felt the personal care went OK, I am my own worst critic and I find it easier to focus on what went wrong rather than what went well. In terms of Joans personal care, I didnt forget anything and I think it went pretty smoothly but that was thanks to the cooperation of Joan who let me rotate her in the bed several times as I tried to dress the bed around her while attempting to clean her. As I look back on it now, I guess my biggest concern with Joans personal care was that there was no care aide to stand over me to offer constructive feedback. I am looking forward to completing our training on mental and physical assessments as I have being practicing them in my day to day conversations with the patients to gage their cogitative and physical abilities. After completing Joans personal care, I next moved on to Reta who does not appear to have any cognitive impairment. During my personal care with Reta, I had asked her many of the same questions I had asked her last week to gage her memory. Her answers were consistent with last weeks answers. For example I had asked her how long she had being a resident and if she remembered some of the students names from last week. With all the excitement surrounding the administration of medication, I found it was easy to forget that we are equally as responsible for our patients personal care. That said, I was quite excited about giving medications this week and I have to say it didnt faze me. I felt I was quiet confident giving Retas medications and I felt they went quiet well. I am also cognizant of the

fact that confidence is easy when you have the safety net of an instructor looking over your shoulder to ensure your have administered them properly. I feel its important to keep this in mind as over confidence typically leads to oversights and mistakes. After lunch, it was quiet so I decided to spend some time talking to Reta. In my conversations with all patients, I try to stoop to their level to allow for better one to one interaction. During my conversation with Reta she began to talk about her son and the pain his death caused her. Once again I screened her conversation for consistency with last weeks conversation and found no abnormalities. During my palliative training, we were trained that if a patient starts crying, only offer them a tissue if they request it as to offer a tissue without request indicates that their tears makes you feel uncomfortable. This was a small error I made with Reta when she began crying as she talked about her son. One positive I did take away for this was the fact that I recognized the error. Wednesday Aug 22nd 2012 I was feeling a lot more confident today going into clinical. I was concerned that I was not giving personal care correctly so I asked if I could assist one of the care aids as she gave personal care to one of the other women in Retas room. I felt this was a valuable experience as it helped eliminate my concerns from the previous day. Later that morning, I gave Joan her personal care again and I felt it went a lot more smoothly and quickly. One of the biggest takeaways from this week was the fact that I felt I was now developing a routine of personal care and medication administration which I feel is an important achievement. I gave Reta her medications again this morning and again I was happy with how it went. I am a little concerned about my level of knowledge of medication and condition cards. While I have the information

written down and I know where to find them, I want to develop my knowledge base to a point where I can recite all pertinent information as required. I had another interesting conversation with Pat today. My approach when talking to Pat is different than the approach I talk with some of the older patients. Pat is one of the younger patients and I believe he feels isolated in Cedar hills. My approach when talking to Pat is to talk to him in much the same manner I would talk to one of my friends, as an equal. If hes struggling with anything I typically wont offer to help unless he asks. The tone of my conversation with Pat is relaxed, almost as if I dont care. I find Pat is more accepting when he feels he is being treated as an equal, like his chair and his MS dont exist. Pat is another example as to why I am looking forward to my Mental and physical assessment training as I am keen to slowly develop a therapeutic relationship with Pat where I can start to delve into his anger and get him to open up to me a bit more. Right now I feel Pat likes me but is only interested in expressing his frustrations towards his condition and nothing else. In summary, I enjoyed this week, I feel that my confidence levels have grown and I am very keen to take on new challenges. I was concerned on Monday about my abilities to give proper personal care but I feel my request to assist in one today was very beneficial to me. I feel like I am ready to start mental and physical assessments without jeopardizing the other skills I am learning. I also felt a little overwhelmed today after clinical. We have being talking alot about the amount of assignments, essays and midterms that are due and I found it easy to get mixed up in other peoples anxiety and I began to panic myself. Normally I dont let situations like this bother me, but I am in a unique situation in this clinical where I am surrounded by other stressed classmates. I am going to have to learn not to get drawn into such conversations in future weeks.