Student Nursing During The Pandemic

Student Nurse, Alexandria, outlines a day in the life of her Nursing placement during the pandemic, with observations on emerging illnesses and how Student Nursing is changing.

Topics covered in this article

Introduction

My Current Placement

Observing The Aftermath Of Coronavirus

Preparing For Placement

My Daily Responsibilities

Heading Home For The Day

Introduction

Hi guys, I'm literally filming this as I'm about to go to a night shift.

Today's video is going to be another placement vlog, a day in the life of a second year Student Nurse.

If you don't know me, hello, my name is Alex.

I'm a second year Student Nurse at Kings College London.

And this placement that I'm on right now is kind of officially my first, how do I say it?

My first second year placement because my last first year placement got canceled and postponed to the beginning of second year.

So it's still technically counted as a first year placement.

I had a lot of adjusting to do in second year.

There's a lot more expected of you.

You're supposed to have a lot more independence.

Obviously, there's kind of a baseline amount of knowledge that you're supposed to know from first year.

Everyone learns differently and I think a lot of placement areas do respect that.

And once you tell people that, you know, there's certain things that you're comfortable and not comfortable with doing, you know, no one's going to force you to do anything that's out of your comfort zone.

And if you feel like you're not being challenged enough, then obviously you should address that.

My Current Placement

My current placement, for those who don't know, is general medical surgical ward.

So we get a lot of patients coming from surgeries.

A lot of them coming in from getting their appendix removed and then your kind of general problems.

You get some babies that come in with failure to thrive.

So they're not gaining weight properly.

You get fractures and just different types of pain.

You get mental health patients coming in for like overdoses.

Just generally like sick toddlers and your everyday kind of childhood illnesses and childhood injuries as well.

There's a lot of variety. I think being on general wards is a really good learning experience.

Similarly to A and E, a lot of the things you get are very different every day.

Sometimes you have patients that need literally next to no carers and you can just go like do that Obs every four hours and they might need the odd bit of paracetamol but it's very simple.

And then you get the complete other end of the spectrum where your patients are like extremely complex and they need like round the clock care.

They have carers, they have like meds all the time.

They need regular observations.

So there's a real variety.

Observing The Aftermath Of Coronavirus

And also one thing that I found really interesting about this placement, is that we've seen a lot of patients coming in with something called PIMS-TS, which you can look up if you're interested about it.

It's basically a childhood illness that is more likely seen in kind of primary aged school children and also like toddler age, which is the kind of ages that I've seen it in.

And it's basically a condition that is caused by COVID.

So lots of kids who had COVID and then get better, then a couple of months later end up with symptoms like red eyes, fever, rashes, just general irritability.

And then they end up getting diagnosed with PIMS.

It's really interesting 'cause I've never heard about it before I came onto this placement and actually helped to look after these patients.

It's treated with kind of like general antibiotics and fluids and things like that and it can actually be quite severe.

I read up about it, it can affect your organs.

It can affect your heart quite badly as well.

So COVID is not just serious in adults, it's also quite serious, the aftermath of it is actually quite serious in children.

Obviously with older people, you've heard a lot about long COVID, but yeah, PIMS seems to be the thing for children.

So that's something really new and interesting that a lot of people are trying to figure out more about.

The symptoms are quite similar to Kawasaki disease if you know what that is, that's something interesting that I've seen on this placement.

So anyway, yeah, enough of me rambling,

I'm just gonna get on and show you the vlog of the day shift that I filmed, hope you guys enjoy it.

Preparing For Placement

I am not a morning person, but it is what it is.

So after I woke up, I had hopped in the shower, got dressed, did my hair.

And in this video you just see me doing my makeup.

I put on some concealer 'cause I gotta hide those bags.

Then I moved onto my eyebrows.

I just like to do simple, minimal makeup because I don't wanna put too much on underneath a mask 'cause that would just make me break out.

So I just do kind of like concealer, mascara, eyebrows, just to make myself feel a bit more alive, as you can see, so yeah.

Half asleep, but ready to go.

I cannot leave my house without eating breakfast, even if it's something small.

So I just had some water, Rice Krispies and some toast before I left the house, just to line my stomach.

I packed my bag, brush my teeth and then I was ready to go.

I'm taking advantage of the NHS Uber discount.

So I got a cab to the hospital.

My Daily Responsibilities

Hi guys, I know this is a bit weird because I'm literally filming in the toilet but there's nowhere else to really do it.

It's quiet here, as you can see I'm really sweaty that's why I've not got my mask on 'cause I'm like in the toilet.

Everyone's actually been really good.

The supervisor I'm working with is so nice, we've got a complex patient and another patient that's not complex at all, so it's a nice variety.

I've been doing strict input and output, fluid pump reading, feed pump reading, observations, drug calculations for IV's.

My hair is a mess as you can tell, it's just a mess.

I'm about to go on my break.

So I'm back in the toilet to film.

As you can tell, I look even more crazy.

My hair looks mad, I have been setting up fluids, making up IV's, with supervision obviously.

What else have I been doing?

Just been like monitoring because one of my patients is quite complex.

So his numbers were going all over the place.

We've been just checking on that, making up meds, all sorts and just been really busy.

So I'm gonna go take my lunch break because I am starving.

So I don't know if you guys can hear me but I am finished, my shift is done.

It was so busy and so productive.

I did so many different new things.

Like what I was saying before.

I think it was really nice working with complex patients because you got to see a whole range of different like medications, a whole range of different, just a whole load of different things and just yeah.

Working with parents as well, especially when the parents are the carers.

It's quite interesting.

Heading Home For The Day

So yeah, I'm just on my way home.

I still look a wreck, I just look greasy, sticky from the mask and just from it being hot.

I didn't really do too many new things after the last time I spoke to you guys but one of my patients went down to theatre and then we picked them up from recovery and obviously did like regular observations.

And before they went and I did like the pre-op checklist and just like just maintaining observations of all of our patients and like their input and their output and things like that.

One of our patients, the parents do the majority of the meds so that made life a lot easier for like myself and the Nurses.

But yeah, it was really good day, it was really busy.

I was on a long day yesterday as well and tomorrow I'm on a night, so I'm tired.

I've got a lot of adjusting to do but I've got a long weekend coming up so I'm happy about that.

But yeah, that's it from me.

I hope you enjoyed the video vlog, bye.