hi my name is Grace and i am a third year physiotherapy student at
the university of brighton currently on my leadership placement
this consists of two days working clinically with a fall's prevention team
and three days working with the leadership team of the hospital
so my first day was an introductory day
i got to know the team and see the people were in leadership positions
in the hospital we got to sit in on a advanced clinical
forum which was really nice to see different
clinical leads come together and have that networking which was also really
nice and my favorite part of the day was just
being able to sit down with my supervisor in the morning
and she took the time to hear about my last placement and what i want to do
better on this placement go through my goals and that was really
really positive so on tuesday it was another leadership
day and that was just project work so me and
angie were working on our projects and planning what we were
going to do trying to draft up our plans in order to
feed them back to our supervisor on thursday and this
involved picking senior physiotherapists in senior leadership
positions and i'd say aim high like with all
the work that you're doing strive to do your best don't limit yourself because
the sky is the limit i also learned another tool from my
supervisor which is the gantt chart for time management and that helped me
learn how to manage time and is a transferable skill which i can bring
into school and into uni for
topics such as the dissertation so that was really cool to learn
on wednesday was my first clinical day i was super super nervous because i didn't
know what to expect joining a new team and i kind of got
settled into the leadership stuff but it was really really nice i got to
see a compassionate and safety culture take
place which is some of the reading that i had done
around the leadership stuff because a band 5 was able to
ask the whole team for help with a patient
and they were all giving their suggestions and that's a good sign of
leadership when you have that compassion and safety culture where you
can have staff that are engaging and who feel
safe to ask rather than someone being afraid to ask out of fear
of judgment so that was really really beautiful to see
and then i went on my first visit that day and was able to see a physiotherapy
force assessment and i loved that this band 5 physio
who i was with the first thing that he did was ask the
patient for their account rather than just going off what he had read on the
notes because had he had done that then we wouldn't have known
that the patient was actually complaining of pain
in another location to what was on the note so
that taught me to always be patient centered and always
ask them firsthand about their account as well he asked me for feedback based
on what i saw and that taught me the importance of
asking for feedback and for bettering our practice so that's
something i want to take forward in the future
on thursday we had
another leadership day and this was when we were feeding back
our draft plans for our projects and i really really enjoyed that day
especially in the afternoon because i was able to have a
meeting with my supervisor and talk about a piece of work that i'd
read and reflect on
that to her and reflect on how it affected me
on my last placement and that ended up being a really lovely
bonding opportunity and i'd say whenever you feel like you
need to reflect just go to educater and say can i
have some time to talk to you about this and you don't
know how the conversation will go it might end up being
really really lovely and then finally friday today
was my clinical day and i spent their day with the occupational therapist
in the morning and in the afternoon so in the morning we went to see a patient
and this patient was assessed and was given some exercises the environment was
checked to see if it was all appropriate for this
patient and in the afternoon i was able to see
a bed transfer a bath transfer and measuring of equipment and then the
booking of the equipment to see what can be done to help
this patient that was experiencing falls so overall it was a fantastic week
i've really really really enjoyed it i'm looking forward to next week
there's a lot of work to do this weekend but
i'm so excited and it's really opening my eyes to the prospect of
leadership work for physios and it starts
with students it doesn't have to start later on in your career anyone can be a
leader so yeah thank you so much