Reflection Submission

Morgan Burke

Sault College, SCNS 2

September 30, 2021

Introduction

Reflection provides nursing students with a baseline for understanding their own
professional practices as well as recognizing their own strengths and weaknesses. In a study
conducted by Kamari et al. (2017) it was revealed that nursing students who reflected on their
clinical experiences and took measures to alleviate their weaknesses caused their mentality and
caring behavior to change, allowing them to provide more efficient clinical care. The Gibbs’
Reflective Cycle encourages users to consider their emotions when participating in practice-led
activities (University of Southern Queensland, 2021).

Description

The incident I will be reflecting on occurred whilst I was placed on the Acute Care ward
during week 2 of my clinical orientation. The nurse I was placed with had a patient who was
admitted due to aspiration. Upon her arrival, we read the nursing notes which highlighted that
she had significant verbal communication difficulties due to a neurological condition, and she
was beginning to experience tremors. In the beginning of the day when we assessed the patient
her vitals were stable, although her blood pressure was 94/54. As the day progressed the patient's
tremors began to increase in frequency, her temperature reached a peak of 38.6, and she began to
have three episodes of tonic-clonic seizures. The nurse paged the patient's doctor and called the
Critical Care Response Team (CCRT) in order to aid with stabilizing the patient.

Feelings

Prior to the incident occurring, I was mindful that the patient's condition as time went on
began to worsen in the sense that her temperature was rising, and her general appearance was
turning pale and cyanotic. At the time of the incident, her oxygen saturation dropped to 78 and
her risk for aspirating was increasing. As a nursing student I did feel out of place in the sense that
there were many different roles being assigned and they had to be done in a timely manner which
made me worried about getting in the way of those who were working. I found it interesting to
watch the multidisciplinary team communicate with each other in order to find a conclusion.
Observing the multidisciplinary team speak about different medications that must be
administered allowed me to reflect on our previous lecture on anti-epileptic drugs to gain a better
understanding of the reasoning.

Evaluation/Analysis/Conclusion

Once the patient was stabilized I was able to relate back to the lectures from the previous
week. I got to experience the knowledge I had previously learnt being implemented in a working
environment. The multidisciplinary team began to monitor the patients adverse effects when
using benzodiazepines and anti-epileptic drugs and I was able to understand the rationale behind
each assessment and test. In hindsight, after reflecting with my clinical instructor about
preventative actions that should be put in place to decrease chances of aspiration in the patient I
noticed that those actions were not done fully. This led to the doctor asking for them to be put in
place while the patient's risk of aspiration was increasing. The suctioning machine was not set up
and had not been tested prior to recurring seizure which created an increased risk of aspiration.
Although this is an unfortunate event it allowed me to gain a better understanding of the roles
each person plays in the hospital and the importance of planning for what could happen to my
patients. Working alongside a multidisciplinary team has created a deeper understanding of why
we engage as we do, and with each individual focused on a different aspect of the patient's status
we have an increased chance of identifying the patient's areas of need, and will further be able to
effectively manage those needs.
 Reflection

Bartlette, C., & Derrington, K. (2021, January 20). Types of assignments – Academic success.

University of Southern Queensland – Free and Open Textbooks.

https://usq.pressbooks.pub/academicsuccess/chapter/types-of-assignments/

Kamari, S., Haghani, F., Yamani, N., & Kalyani, M. (2017, September). Exploring the

perception of nursing students about consequences of reflection in clinical settings.

PubMed Central (PMC). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5633212/