401021 Professional Nurse or Midwife Case Study assignment-Western Sydney University Australia

Instruction to students: This is an individual assignment.

401021 Professional Nurse or Midwife Case Study assignment

Case Study

Have you ever come across another student in their final year of their degree that is willing to be honest about how they feel? The first thing they will say is that they feel they don’t know enough, that they are scared that they are going to graduate, get their scrubs, put them on and walk into their first day on the floor and not actually know what to do next.

Do you remember being on your last placement and looking around at the staff who all seemed to know where to go, who to talk to, what to do and when to do it and feeling so incapable and so far from that level and almost wishing I could study for another year, another two! You may have felt like a fraud, that you had somehow gotten this far only because you had flown under the radar, which you hadn’t been ‘found out’ for being the inexperienced, unprepared nearly- nurse or nearly-midwife that you felt you were.

You may think…
“I wish someone had saved me from going through all of that. I wish that I had been more honest with how I was feeling and that  someone was able to tell me what I would eventually learn for myself: That I wasn’t a fraud and that I was in fact as prepared as I possibly could have been, that I wasn’t pretending to be a nurse or midwife, that I was becoming a nurse or midwife”….

The healthcare system is a well-oiled and well established machine. The degrees to train the clinicians who eventually end up working within the healthcare system are in themselves well developed and it’s important for you to trust the process.

In your first week of working you will most likely have several shifts of what is called ‘supernumerary’ (being paired with more  experienced staff) and you will move through each shift together to give you time to settle in to the environment you’ve found yourself in and to become orientated to where things are, how this machine works, how that gadget turns on, how that line of communication
works etc.

Once you develop more confidence and experience in your clinical setting you will be allowed to do more and more independently, but there will always be a chain of command and different resources at your disposal any time you have a query or just want to double, triple check something before you go ahead with it and don’t feel shy or feel like ‘a pain in the neck’ for utilising these resources even when it’s busy.

You will earn way more street cred for becoming known as a safe new nurse or midwife, than you will if you just want to try and avoid ‘bothering anyone’ and get on with it by yourself. You will be moving through the transition stages from doing, being and knowing, to becoming. Benner (2004) reinforces your learning development within the clinical setting, by you moving through the stages of novice to advanced beginner health care providers initially. Midwives, in principle, can relate their initial stages of clinical
competency and learning development with the first two stages of Benner’s skill acquisition as well.

Template: 401021 Professional Nurse or Midwife Case Study assignment-Western Sydney University Australia