hello my name is Grace and i'm a third year
physiotherapy student at the university of brighton currently on my leadership
placement and today i will be reflecting on week three of my
placement and it is quite insane to think that it's
already week three it's going so quickly and i'm honestly so happy because i'm
loving it so much but there you go so monday was a
clinical day for me so that consisted of going on three visits
with my educator and that was really nice i was able
to take some obs of people and practice more of the
outcome measures and working on my communication it was
nice because last week my educator gave me a set of
exercises that is evidence-based so i was able to
look at that over the weekend and start using them on these patients
but one thing that stuck out to me is that
i further need to work on my communication
to just make sure patients understand what i'm telling them to do because
there was a bit of miscommunication with the sidestep exercise with one of the
patients so i need to continue to work on that
tuesday was the day that i did some interviews with some of the
physios in these leadership positions so first of all i started off by
interviewing Karen Middleton in the morning
and then Adam Doyle in the afternoon and both of them
were amazing to talk to they both had such inspiring stories
and it showed me that there was like a similar thing between these people and
other people that we've interviewed that they felt this need to step up that they
might have been feeling frustrated with how
things were going in the service but they had that courage
and they took that step of faith and it's
paying off and they are literally normal people and
yeah it was so so touching and inspiring to hear their
story so yeah i really really loved that and in the afternoon i had a catch up
with my educator so it's really nice because she really
makes the time to just see how i'm going and i think that's
really important for educators to do and i think as well i
filmed a video for this project um
for the csp so that was really nice to answer questions
based on my experience as well like one of the questions that stuck out to me
was um what is one thing that a educator
should know about a student i said that's really important that you check
in on them and see if they're okay because it's so easy i know i'm in the
past guilty of just being like i'm okay i'm fine
but actually when you probe and actually see gauging where they are constantly
because sometimes people are too afraid to speak up yeah
just make sure they're constantly okay wednesday
was another leadership day so in the morning
me and angie sat in on the sussex ahp council meeting
and that was such a lovely experience to see
the running and the behind the scenes because sometimes you kind of take for
granted what's going on and you don't realize
all the work that's going on in the background so it was nice to get some
insight into that and see how they're planning to make provisions
for student placement and um the budgeting and financial
stuff to that that was really really interesting so i really really enjoyed
that in the afternoon began to become a bit
more of a stressful day because we were planning some stuff on
one of the projects and actually i felt like this was the first time
since i started my placement that i got overwhelmed with
the sheer volume of the work but actually that taught me
the importance of managing stress so there's a couple of strategies that i
have to manage my stress levels i like to go on a run
i like to exercise or to play my guitar or sometimes even read the bible
to help just de-stress and it's so important that's
one thing that Adam mentioned when you're on leadership
you need to have that structural scaffolding around you so
when things aren't going so well you know how to recover and you know how
to bounce back so then yesterday was another clinical day
so so many opportunities that day i got to witness a shoulder assessment which
was a nice recap of um the msk stuff that we've
done at uni and actually it taught me that these things that you learn in uni even
though you might not be so confident it stays ingrained in you and sometimes
you'll be surprised at how much you can actually remember
and then later on i went on a fear of falling visit with an occupational
therapist and that was really nice to see how they
are looking at the mental aspect of patients as well as the physical
and then in the afternoon i was doing some telephone calls with my
educator and we were triaging patients and that was really nice to
learn how to alter my communication because sometimes you might have
patients who are hard of hearing or who might have
dementia so being able to tailor your communication to make it um
make the terminology easier for them to understand is a really good skill
to be adaptable in that way so that was really nice to have that practice
and then today um was friday which was another leadership day so
in terms of my project one work with the full service i was developing a quick
guide and actually found out that the way i was doing it wasn't in line with
the vision of what was planned so yesterday when i
found that out i thought okay i'm gonna go home rethink and
move on and kind of reset you know and just
produce a better product so that's what i ended up doing and show that to my
educator and that was a really great learning
process for me because sometimes you might not be doing something right
or might be not in line with what the plan is for what you've been told
but it's about how you are resilient in those situations
not giving up but just resetting and making a better product
so that ended up actually exciting me more and actually being better and i had
my halfway feedback today so that was really good to see how i'm
getting on i think it's important to understand
throughout your placement even in between those periods of the halfway
like maybe at the end of what first week second week third week
and so on to know how you're doing so you can
progress and move on and do better for the next week so maybe ask your educator
at the end of the week how do you think i did this week what do
you think i can do better to do what do you think i can do for next week
to do even better so yeah i have absolutely loves this
week it's been challenging i won't lie and i'm so grateful because
you build resilience in these situations and it's all
part of your learning so yeah i will see you
next week