Buzzing 'Round Here

You can tell its a test week (luckily not for me) -- the seniors have one this week. Blessedly this week my cohort doesn't have one. Then we have something like 5 tests in the next 3 weeks. You won't be hearing a peep from me after this post. Yes--it's test week. Girls in sweats and messy pony tails flopped over every couch and comfy chair on every floor of the residence. Sprawled in the halls. Smudges under their eyes.

My class was back in clinicals this week. We go on Tuesdays to take care of our assigned patient. That means we do pre-planning on Mondays. The ratio of hours spent planning to take care of our patient, to hours spent actually caring for our patient seems to be about 1:1. Mondays we throw on our "assessment clothing" (career wear) under our lab coats and invade the ward -- looking for information about our patient, usually from the chart. We need to collect about a zillion data points in order to complete our paperwork, which will be due by end of day Tuesday. By the next morning we should be very familiar with what our patient has, how to care for them, what meds they are on (and what they do, what the side effects are, etc) and anything else relevant to their care--even though we have never met them. (We are welcome to meet them and even get our head to toe assessment done the night before...but who has the time?! --Actually it has more to do with interrupting their dinner and their sleep. Plus many of them are coming back from surgery and too groggy to put up with us.)

A person could go blind reading the charts. They are easily 4 inches thick and range from handwritten gibberish, nonsensical (to me) lab results, graphs, charts, and piles and piles of forms. I expect if we laid each page of a single chart end to end, we'd easily travel to the moon. The only good thing is that after weeks of hunting through them looking for the same information, I'm getting quite familiar with where to look. I'm getting faster. But it seems just as I get comfortable with something...they ask us for even more paperwork. So the ratio never really seems to change. One hour of pre-planning for every hour of care. At least for me. But I'm old and slow.  :)

The graphic designer in me is chafing at the poorly designed forms I'm forced to work with. Information design is one of my favorite topics. Its both a science and an art. The healthcare industry could truly benefit by investing in good design. Productivity and comprehension would increase. Error and eye-strain...reduced. Everybody wins! Lord, even the user interface on the "new" computerized charting systems seems pulled right from the early 90's. Nightmare!

Don't even get me started on the signage and wayfinding systems. Cringe!

Tonight I'm studying for a vocabulary quiz on elimination. There are more latin-derived words to describe pee and poo than I ever could have imagined. Speaking of poo -- I encountered my first (and long feared) diarrhea adult diaper change this week, and conquered it. Man...somebody else in my class got to insert their first catheter, while another had a wound vac...how cool is that?! (A wound vac is a machine that basically shrink-wraps draining wounds and applies suction.) And all I got this week was lousy loose stool. I was recently exposed to some pretty gnarly wounds and I just can't wait for more so I can practice my newly acquired wound-care skills.

It is really weird what nursing students think is exciting.