Hello!
So I ought to start with a bit of an introduction I guess - my name is Beth, I'm nineteen years old and I am in my first year of a degree in Child Nursing. I'm now six weeks into my university journey and my journey to becoming a paediatric nurse. I thought I might as well be fashionably late and start blogging my experiences as a student and my thoughts and opinions on working in healthcare. I keep being told that the next three years will change me, that what I see and do will impact on my life forever and that I will grow enormously (sadly not in height...) and learn to become a health professional. I'd really like to try and document this, along with my tips and tricks to being a Student Nurse and how to apply for Nursing at university (something that is becoming more and more difficult and competitive!)
So far, I've settled really well into university life. I think at this point, halfway through Semester 1, I've really found my feet here. I've made some wonderful friends on my course, I am extremely lucky to have some brilliant flatmates and I'm figuring out how to actually "do" adult life. Trust me - I thought I was a pretty independent young adult when I lived at home, but nothing is quite like moving out and having huge amounts of adult responsibility handed to you overnight!
I'm really enjoying my course at the moment. It's intense, that's no lie - and the fact that we only have two days of contact hours a week means that you really have to have good time management skills and make sure you're doing plenty of independent study. That's something that suits me quite well - I never really enjoyed the hugely structured timetable I had throughout school and 6th form and much preferred to do my own thing.
We will spend from October until April in "theory", solely studying at the university, until we go out into placement. At the moment, we are taught in mixed profession groups with the three branches of Nursing (adult, child and mental health), paramedics, ODPs and midwives all taught the same things together. It sounds unhelpful, as some things we are taught could be considered "irrelevant" to some branches. However, I really am finding this experience invaluable - in practice, we will all be working in inter-disciplinary teams to provide care for our patients. In my opinion, if we can learn from other professionals now and gain the skills to work together well, we will be much better prepared for going out into placement.
We do three modules - a clinical skills module, an A&P module and a care and professionalism module. Clinical skills is by far my favourite module as it's very much about gaining hands on experience in a clinical style setting. What I really liked about my university before I applied here was their excellent simulation suite and I have to say it has lived up to my expectations. Without sounding over-confident, I feel like I have learned so much of the basic stuff already.
A&P is very very full on - I am extremely grateful that I studied A Level biology as that really has given me a solid background knowledge which I have heavily relied on throughout the past five weeks. The trickiest bit is the sheer amount of knowledge given to us at once - we cover a body system a week (so far we have done cells, tissues & genetics, immunity, the respiratory system and the cardiovascular system) so you have to be on the ball! But I'm a science-y person and massively enjoy A&P topics as they really capture my interests. I'm enjoying learning about how common illnesses relate to our body systems and applying practice to theory. This is our only examined module for the semester - we will have our exam at the beginning of January and fingers crossed it'll be fine!
Finally, the care and professionalism module. I really do find many aspects of this interesting, and I think it has been the module I've been able to relate to children the most. It's been really good to learn about the Nursing codes, professionalism, what it is to be caring, communication models and much more. We have been set an assignment for this module and our piece of work has to be related to our field of practice so I've been doing lots of reading on caring for children, the Bristol Inquiry, the Nottingham Model and Gillick competency to name a few bits and bobs. It's been very interesting learning how to write academically and how to reference properly, and actually something I really enjoy doing.
So, the idea is for me to write a recap of the week, every week and some other posts interspersed as and when I think of them. We'll see how that goes!
For now, so long
