The nurse that I found to interview was fairly easy to find, it is my dad. My dad has been one of the charge nurses on a cardiac floor for 5 years. While I think that my dad has great qualities as a parent, I was able to witness his leadership skills when I was floated to the floor he worked on as a PCA. I was not expecting my dad to be the charge nurse when I arrived to the floor but when I did he quickly demonstrated his skills as a leader. The first thing I noticed was that he treated everyone on the floor as equals. Even though he was working with his son, he never missed a beat and treated me the same way he did everyone else. He made the staff feel that they were respected, and he wasn’t going to have favorites. The second quality I found that made him a good leader was his leadership style. He has a combination of an authoritarian and lassiez faire attitude. He allowed for the staff to do what they needed to get done for the day but if things weren’t getting done, he seemed to make sure that people were getting back on track. I could tell this made for the rest of the staff respect him and his leadership, so they listened to him and followed his instruction. While he is my dad, I am still excited to interview him and see him in a light I have not seen him before. I am interested to learn how he was able to get comfortable leading and taking charge of the floor, how he deals with any conflict that may have come up, what is the biggest challenge he has had to face while being a charge nurse. I have talked to him plenty about some of the experiences he has had as a nurse, but he never really talked about the specifics of being the charge nurse. I think that at the end of this interview I will have a better idea on what it took for him to become a charge nurse of the floor and a better insight on his leadership skills.
Month: February 2022
Pharmacology ATI
Out of all the CAT adaptive exams we are going to take for this course, the pharmacology exam was going to give me the most trouble. For this exam I felt that for not being too confident in my pharmacology knowledge, I think it went fairly well. I was able to sit down and focus on the assignment at hand for the most part. With the number of questions, I had to answer I felt myself towards the end not having 100% focus on the assignment and it led to many stupid mistakes. Some of those included answering the math questions. For questions I typically get correct on these exams, I found myself making mistakes like missing a decimal or miss typing the number for the answer. A second test strategy that I felt went well for this CAT exam was I went through some of the old slide shows we had from pharmacology to try and shake off any of the old cobwebs and did a quick refresher. While I was skeptical at first to do it because I figured it might not be the most helpful thing ended up really helping me answer some of the questions.
For the next adaptive quiz we need to take, I have some positive takeaways from this exam to use. Having an environment that allows me to sit down and really focus on the questions and not be distracted by outside factors really helped me do well on this exam. Along with just even skimming over some notes or some book chapters can be very beneficial. Finally, I need to make sure I am giving myself a break if the exam ends up being long. Towards the end I was getting frustrated with the fact that it wasn’t ending which led to me not paying attention to what I was doing and just submitting questions to get through them. This ultimately led up to me making more work for myself.
Adult Med Surge ATI
After completing the first adaptive ATI quiz, I did better than I was expecting to do. Overall, I was able to finish the quiz in 76 questions. I felt that there was a good amount of the questions were fresh in my head from trying to complete some of the other ATI assignments and even some from our other courses we have taken throughout our time here. However, the ones I got wrong either completely stumped me or I made silly mistakes that I shouldn’t have. While doing the remediations for the exam it was very evident I did not spend enough time thoroughly reading some of the questions and ended up getting them wrong. For the next CAT exam I am going to make sure that I really read and pay attention to the question and all the options available before selecting am answer and moving onto the next question. I think this will help improve my score overall next time and it will help me to avoid making mistakes.
Career Development
A skill that the nurses had in the movie that I believe I need to continue to work on and improve is talking with families. So far in our course work we haven’t really focused too much on emotional intelligence which is a difficult skill to master. I think that this skill is one that needs to come with practice and practice. One of the patient populations that we as nursing students at UNE is the man who the nurse must drive hours into the desert. this nurse has to face many different barriers of care. There is nothing for hours around this patient make it difficult to get to him in the case of an emergency or provide care overall. This nurse also needs to be ready to do things that a nurse would not have to do in a conventional nursing role. The nurse’s humility is shown by her giving care in the first place. To give this patient care they had to drive hours just for one patient.
After the guest speakers from the career services came and spoke to us it gave me different things to think about when going in for a job interview. When it comes to standing out from the crowd of applicants, I like to make sure I have questions prepared. I’m going to make sure that the hospital aligns with my values as a nurse so having questions ready for the interviewer will make sure they do. One of the strengths I plan to show interviewers is my punctuality and making sure things are done on time. When it comes to “challenges” I think I would describe it as a slight lack of confidence. I feel like I do not know as much as I actually know sometimes and that makes me question what I do from time to time. In order to work on this challenge I will make sure to continue my education as a nurse making sure that I’m staying up to date with the latest practices. I think this will make me more confident as a nurse and improve my practice overall.
