Four days until the real world.

Yep, I feel like the little girl in the picture because in 4 days nursing school will be OVER! Last week we finished up our community health rotation at the health department. Tuesday was our last day at Core Health and I got to go out and shadow the nurse on her enrollment visit. The visit took about 2 hours and I got to see how the nurse enrolls a new client and all of the information that she needs to collect. It was kind of a cool way to wrap up my time at Core Health. I really didn't love our involvement in the program just because we only had time to go on usually one or two visits each day and we never got to see the same clients more than once. So because of this we really never got to build any kind of relationship with the clients or really teach them much of anything. It was nice to see all of the things that the program does and in that was it was a good experience, I just don't feel like we really got a whole lot out of it. So after that I had a visit with one of my health department clients buuuut she no-showed and both of the phone numbers I had for her were disconnected. So that was a bust. So we spent the rest of the day working on our teaching/learning presentation.

Thursday we presented a timeline of our LEI (elderly) clients that we have been working with for the past five semesters. It was actually kind of cool to hear everyone talk about their clients and see how different all of them are. Then we ran through our presentation a few times, did our evaluations with our instructor and left at noon to go to lunch :)Overall the health department was an interesting experience. I don't feel that I really got a ton out of it, but I definitely did learn some things. I learned to consider the environment that people live in, the resources that they have available to them and what they are going home to once they leave the hospital. I also learned about TONS of resources in Grand Rapids that I never even knew existed. I also got to see many different areas of the health department, like the TB clinic and the STD clinic. It did open my eyes to a lot of the problems that people in lower socioeconomic status have to cope with in order to care for themselves. So although it wasn't my favorite rotation, I did gain a lot of insight and I think I was able to get something out of it that I can apply no matter where I work in the future.

So moral of the story, I'm glad that community health is over because it means we are one step closer to being done!

Also today we presented our teaching/learning project and got a 99% on it :) Win.