Mumtaz Mughal ARNTP Student
I
completed my clinical experience for “Aged Care” at Hawker Memorial
Hospital.
Hawker is 400kms from Adelaide and called “the hub of the Flinders Ranges”.
This is a small town and has approximately 200 residents.
The Hawker Memorial Hospital is the only acute and aged care hospital in
that region. I chose to work there so that I could assess how the regional
healthcare is delivered in South Australia. Secondly, I wanted to know what
aged care is as I had never had experience working in aged care in the past. In
my country (Pakistan) we do not have aged care facilities as culturally, the
children and family support and take care of their parents and aged
relatives.
The most interesting experience of my clinical placement was working in aged
care and especially with the dementia patients. I was trying to recall what
we learnt about “dementia” at UniSA. I did not have any past experience
with dementia. Therefore I was not fully sure what it was and how to take
care of dementia patients. When I joined the clinical placement at the
hospital, I reviewed the literature to compare theory with real patients
that I was taking care of at the hospital. I now understand what the
lecturer meant when she said “dementia is irreversible memory loss”. While
working with three of the typical cases of dementia in the aged facility, I
was able to assess them having memory loss for everything. To be very
honest, studying or going through the literature was not fully understood
until I spent time with these patients and realised what signs and symptoms
are present among each patient. I was able to put theory into practice. Care
of dementia patients is one more reason for me to choose “aged care” as
my career pathway. It is really satisfying to be able to help these patients
for their feeding, bathing, toileting and other activities of daily living.
I am not very concerned that I did not gain much experience in acute care as
I felt my experience with aged care was much more satisfying and made my
days very worthwhile here at Hawker Hospital. I feel really satisfied here
and one of the elderly patients was always telling me “you are a good woman,
don’t leave me and don’t go away”.
I really enjoyed being in the hospital as all the staff and nurses were very
helpful. They ensured that we gained good nursing experience in our clinical
placement. I would strongly encourage future ARNTP students to select this
facility for their clinical placement and/or future nursing jobs.