Coming to a close with Great Lakes

My time with Great Lakes Home Healthcare and Hospice is coming to an end and I have had an amazing experience. I truly feel like I have become a part of the staff and I am very sad to be leaving. Kailey and I were welcomed with open arms and the staff accommodated us very well. As I said in my previous post, we have had the opportunity to work with med/surg, mom/baby, wound, and hospice nurses. This has given us the opportunity to see people throughout the entire spectrum of life. The nurses allowed us to get so much hands-on experience and I have been able to build on to the nursing skills I already have. Since my first blog post, I have gotten to perform some skills that I have not had the chance to do before. I changed a suprapubic catheter, flushed a medi port, and packet multiple wounds/applied wound vacs. Since I have been running the nursing visits, I have also gotten better at performing my assessments and recognizing abnormals.

Throughout our time with these three nurses, we tried to figure out what type of project would benefit our patient population the best. Because the patients are separated into categories (mom/baby, wound, etc) we figured it would be smart to focus on one of those areas. We chose to focus on the mom/baby population due to the lack of information they are currently receiving from the agency. When they are admitted into our agency, the patients receive a general admission packet which contains information related to the agency, infection prevention, etc. but nothing specific to mom/baby. We have also noticed that a lot of the patients are young, first time mothers.

We decided that the best project would be to make a packet that is specific to mom/baby that could be given out with the general admission packet. We started the project by getting input from the nurses on what they felt would be important aspects of the packet. Once we had that, we put together the packets and got approval from the clinical director. We are awaiting final approval from the director before we print and distribute the packets. We feel that these packets will greatly benefit the new mothers and will give them much needed information about taking care of themselves and their new babies.

Overall, this clinical site has been absolutely wonderful and I would recommend it to anyone! The clinical director said that she hopes we will send students again next summer, and I am very glad that we were able to establish this new site. I am sad that it is almost over, but I could not have asked for a better capstone experience!!