Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Today I observed the behavioral interviewing approach. They are implementing a new interview process at the hospital. It is composed of 3 separate hour interview with behavioral interview questions. I learned more about HR role of prescreening canidates for interviews.

The night before my clinical the was a code called. The morning in at the am meeting they were discussing preventive strategies. This hospital is not staffed for that level of care. They have a PICU team that observes the children in the ER and on the inpatient floors for increasing signs of distress so that they can be transported to larger hospital downtown before immediate distress occurs.

I was also able to follow the nursing supervisor around in the morning while my preceptor was at a meeting downtown. I got to see what her roll is which was really busy and interesting. She takes care of staffing the unit for all shift so she deals with admission, discharges and sick call in to make sure the floor runs smoothly.

November 2, 2009

It was nice to have my clinical preceptor back from his mission trip in Africa. Today was supposed to be my last day, but I will have a make up day since he was gone November 19th. Today we met with a new hire to talk about her orientation schedule and vacation before working on the floor. We also had an AIDET meeting to discuss how to educate employees with communication. We looked at the overall patient satisfaction scores and talked about the areas of weakness and what reasons they might have occured. The graphs have shown a decline in communication between nurses and patients, and with increased wait times in the ER, patient are complaining about never being seen by a provider. There has also been an increase in left without being seen rates. We discussed how we would implement education for the staff about communication to families to resolve this problem.