Student Nurses: Writing Notes On Placement

Alexandria, explains why making notes during your placement is so essential with some top tips on keeping up with your revision.

Hi guys, it's Alexandria Grace.

I just thought I would give another placement tip to my fellow Student Nurses.

This one today is about writing notes on placement.

It can be very easy to get caught up and just being really hands-on and wanting to follow the Nurse around, ask questions see different things, attend to your patients which are obviously all things that you need to do and are really important parts of your placement.

But at the same time, it's also important that you're able to retain or have a record of the information that you do learn and the things you do see on placement.

One thing that I like to do, is I like to bring two notebooks, a big one and a mini one.

So my mini one is about this big, and it fits in my pocket in my uniform.

I can carry it around with me if I want to use the spare pages to write in ops, when I go into a patient's room if I just want to just quickly pick out when I'm at the Nurse's desk and write something down.

Maybe a medication that's in one of the patient's notes for example, so kind of small things like that.

When you just quickly want to write something down, I use my mini notebook because it's portable.

I can just fit it in my pocket.

And then my big notebook, I just use a normal big book like the books you would use to write and can school.

I use that book to properly sit down when I have time to actually sit down in a room and write thorough notes

I do that just to keep a record of what I've learned and just for my own revision as well.

For example, when I did my A&E placement, I used that book and I sat down when I had free time and I thoroughly wrote out how to do ACE Assessment in so much detail.

And just writing that out has helped me so much with exams in uni, with simulation in uni and the clinical labs.

And just with general patient interaction and knowing how to properly assess a patient.

Writing the notes out properly in a big notebook has always good when you have time.

So yeah, definitely invest in a big one in a small one.

It be great for your revision.

It will be great, just so you don't forget what you've learned, because everything you learned is so valuable and you can't always retain everything in your head instantly, especially if you're tired because as we all know, placement is tiring.

Hopefully that's a useful tip for you guys.