The begining:

Through out my three years of being posted around the country you can hopefully see how my skills have developed. I can now see the occupational relationship and i have seen a broad range of how occupational therapy works in different settings. For example in fieldwork six i was not sure where Occupational therapy fitted into the placement but by the end of it i could see how its importance. Just by looking through my diary abstracts i have seen how my grammer and occupational language have changed and developed as a student. I encourage you to comment on my blog so that i can get some feed back and also other students that might be looking at this can pull from my experiences and know that they are not the only people who might be going through difficult times. It is also important to remember about cultural safety, when i travelled to th far North i was faced with cultures that i had not had much to do with in the past. Just by going to talk to the Maori liaison i learnt a lot of important protocol that i otherwise would not of know. Through out my three years i have personally realised that it is important for me to understand my own culture before i can understand someone elses. This has been a bit factor in my final year of study and i reccomend that you take this point on board.

Fieldwork Six:

This was a placement that was a bit different from the others. For this placement we were given a project that a service had identified as a need that they wanted us to develop and present. I was working for three weeks with Immigrants and refugees that were new to Dunedin and struggled to use the bus services in Dunedin. I was paired up with another member of my class and from there we had meetings with the agency to develop ideas around the need that was being met. We decided that we were going to present to the service a teaching resource that would have a pamphlet of easy step by step directions to using a bus, a DVD that also gave a step by step visual and audio presentation of how to use a bus from start to finish, and finally we presented them with a teachers resource which was a more indepth look at how to teach the students how to use a bus in Dunedin. To do this we had to do a lot of researching and also did three bus activity analysis so that we could look at this and make it as easy as possible for the immigrants and refugees to follow. We completed this and presented this to the agency, of which they were very pleased with and appreciated all of the hard work. Skills i have developed from this placement were, collaboration and conciliation with others, communication skills, public speaking, prioritising, job sharing and learning to compromise with your partner.

Fieldwork Four

This placement was a good opportunity to work with the same group of clients for the whole five weeks I have been here at the residential home and hospital. It was a good place to practice your interviewing and group facilitation skills. On this placement I ran groups such as art, cooking, bingo, housie, crafts and community outings. Challenges I faced were motivating the residents to participate in the activities, I had to know the routines and seating plan of all of the residents so that there were no fights between residents as some of them are so stuck in their ways and do not except change as a positive. This placement is good for students that have limited knowledge of geriatric care as you get a wide scope of practice with resident living in the rest home, hospital and supported flatting care.

Day Fifteen:

Day Fifteen:

This is my last week of placement, this week I will be tying up all loose ends. The man with MS has received his new wheelchair which we fitted for three weeks ago. I will pass over my case load to MDT. This week I am to take some residents over to Alexandra for appointments. I am still continuing to run and organise group activities which involve brain stimulation and exercise.

Day Eight:

Day Eight:

I have started to get the flu. My supervisor is still off sick so I have been doing initial interviews today on all of the residents that do not yet have one in there profile. This has been a good experience for me as it has given me a chance to practice the interviews and then write up the results in their profiles. It also gives me a chance to spend some time with most of the residence and find out what their interests are and how we can get them engaging in new occupations so they don’t get board and will stay active through out the day.

Day Five:

Day Five:

This is my first week over and it has been quite a week. There has been a bad flu going around all of the patients and staff, so there has man many staff away including my supervisor. This has meant that I have had to do a lot of self directed learning. I have also been joining in on the group activities that the activities people do on a daily bases. Today we took 8 of the residents out for a drive to Arrowtown. It was such a beautiful day so we went for a walk along the main street and stopped in at a café for some lunch. The residents all enjoyed this and wished to go back there soon. I also took my MS patients out with us and he was a changed man when he returned. He was so grateful to be be getting back out and back to his home town.

Day one:

Day One:

Today was my first day at a residential home and hospital. This place is an amazing place. The staff there are so close to the clients and everyone in there seems to get along. I was given a tour of the home and hospital and along the way meet the residents that lived there. The Home part of the establishment is where all the residents with some kind of independence live. The hospital side of it is very high needs and there is a range of illnesses and disabilities from stroke to multiple sclerosis (MS). I meet a man today who is one of my patients to look after while I am there, he is a 53 year old male and he suffers from MS. He is not enjoying living in the hospital and wants to get out for daily trips. This man is blind and also quite deaf so this will be a challenge for me. The other three residents on my case list are two patients that have had strokes and one with dementia. My hours are 9am to 4pm Monday to Friday.

Day One:

Day one:

It was a big shock today when I got up on to ward 11. There is a different feeling up there I don’t feel threatened but there is still the feeling that they can pop at any stage. Today I just had an orientation around the ward and took a client home to there house after a meeting a client review which took the whole morning. This was good for me as I got to hear about all of the clients and what the plan is with the. I arrive up at the hospital about 8:10 and then I work through until 4:30. I am finding that it is very tiring being positive and happy around the patients all day. I took part in the relaxation group.

Fieldwork Two

This placement was my second placement of the year and it was completely different to the first one. This placement was full of activities for stimulating the minds of the clients and also giving them exercise and getting them out in the community. It is important that the clients stay in contact with the community.

Day Six

Day Six

I went for a walk with tree clients to the botanical gardens and feed the ducks. It was a nice day to go for a walk and with time to spare we ended going to the pet shop by the gardens. Here we looked at birds, they seemed to enjoy listening to them. After this we headed home and also had a good chat with the other support workers. I helped to tidy up and unload the dishwasher and feed the clients. We had a meeting with the supervisor today to answer our questions that we need for our final evaluation. Next week we are away on holiday then only three weeks to go.

Fieldwork Three, Second year 2007

This was my first mental health experience and I am glad that I had another class member up there to share with me what I was going through. I think on these placements it is important that you have someone who you can debrief with everyday as it can be quite intense and mentally challenging also. I think that it is important that you remember that they are not just mentally unwell, they are human beings and they are just like you and I.

Day two: Fieldwork three

Day Two:

Today was a better day on the ward but I had a change of therapist and I got put on to the up stairs ward and my therapist has been away but will hopefully be back tomorrow. This morning I spent my time with a therapist down stairs and we went down town to get some money out for a client then we went to the “artsenta” which is a community passed association which provides a place for people to attend that have had a mental health illness or have been affected my mental health in some way. I was very impressed with this service as it provides activities such as jewellery making, learning music, pottery, painting, everything that you could think of to do with the arts was there.

Day Two .

Today Day Two .

We arrived at CCS still very uncertain of what we were meant to be doing but as the afternoon wore on it started to jell together. We arrived at the pool and had changed the two men and were about to get into the pool when the pool was shut down as somebody had pooed in the pool. This put a halt on things so we decided to take the men out to the beach to have a look.

As we were parked up at the beach I was introduced more to the men so that I would get to know how the men operate. He was showing me some of his sign language so now I can have a conversation with him and get to know him a lot better. I also learnt about the other man and how he is very very bright and intelligent but he just can’t express it. He is non verbal this makes it slightly harder to hold a conversation with him at this stage.

There was more conversation held today with both staff and clients who attended CCS. I was starting to feel more comfortable with the environment than on the first day.

Day One

Today was the first day on my second placement of the year. This is a longitudinal placement which means that we are there for half a day once a week for a number of weeks. I am placed there with another girl from my class and we went to there head quarters at 1.00pm and meet up there with our stand-in supervisor. She gave us a very brief tour and then we were put into a van and were off to Moana pool with a client that attends the pools once a week for exercise. We just observed him swim and went back to CCS where we talked to some of the people that worked there and some of the people that attend the centre. I felt a little out of place today but it was good to have a class mate there so that we could discuss what was happening. It was hard because we don’t know what the clients disabilities are or how to communicate with them as a number of them a non verbal. I have no idea who my supervisor is as she wasn’t there today and there are also no OT’s in the setting. Next week I am to go swimming with a client that should be interesting as I feel nervous because I don’t feel I know what I am to do.

First placement in year one.

The following diary abstracts were experiences that I had on my first fieldwork placement in year one. Not only did I have to travel to the North Island for the first time but I was also up there by myself as an 18 year old. As I had grown up in a small rural town in the South Island this was also a big culture shock for me. Just this on its own was a growing time for me and I feel that this was a very good placement for me to start off on. It was an acute placement in a hospital in a large town, and there were also amazing people up there to support me. This also gave me confidence in myself as I felt I could now travel anywhere within New Zealand and I would be fine.

Day Fifteen Monday 26/6/06

Day Fifteen Monday 26/6/06

Today I spent the morning at the Blomefiled School with my supervising therapist. This school is for people that have a disability. There are people from the ages of 5 to 21 who go to the school but after the age of 21 they graduate and they are moved off into care in the community so that they can start working and start to socialize. First off the occupational therapist gave me a tour around the facilities and she explained what she does and disscussed some of the students that we will see during the day. About 9.30am we travelled to the special needs block of another school and there we worked with two different classes, the first one had about 7 children in it with their needs ranging from downs syndrome to learning and behavioral problems these kids were all in the younger age group. The second class that we visited we did baking with, this was to encourage fine motor skills. This class was four teenagers that also had a range of disabilities they completed the task well. After the school visit we took room 3 out on a walk down to Palmers gardening shop and café. Here we just walked around pushing the kids in their wheelchairs and felt things like the water and the plants. We were concentrating on the sensory systems of the kids. Then we returned back to the school after a coffee at the café. It was then time to go back to the hospital where I arrived back to see that one of my patients had died at lunch time. This was a bit of a shock as he seemed alright and was sitting up and talking to me when I last saw him. He had been in for a AAA. I watched as his body was taken away and Maori liaison then went in and blessed the room so that his spirit would be taken away with the body and no other spirits would remain in the hospital room.

Day Seven Wednesday 14/6/06

Day Seven Wednesday 14/6/06

To day was a funny day. It started off in Ward One as usual, I completed another home assessment witch went much better I am starting to make them flow and go into more depth. Then I was off to a professional forum which was a meeting of all the OT’s in the northern region and they just discussed the OT needs and concerns that they have. A major concern that came up today was that people and Health Professionals don’t know about OT’s and what they do so their plan is to organize pamphlets and other ways of providing information so that there is a better awareness of OT’s. The forum went on for just over 2 hours. After lunch, I was lucky enough to talk to an occupational therapist and an Auckland occupational therapy student about what they do in the burns and scars wards. The 3^rd year student that is working with the occupational therapist gave me a bit of a advise about what they do and then I helped them practice an assesment by playing the role of a client. They stuck some jells on me that are used for treatment and gave me also a bandage that is very good and this is also used for the pressure method of scar and burns rehab. After this I was back to Ward one and there I did another home interview this one went really well as my therapist stepped back and gave me some room. I was much more comfortable doing it by myself. I guess that it can be a bit daunting having someone looking over your shoulder at what you are doing.

Day Three Thursday 8/6/06

Day Three Thursday 8/6/06

Today was a big learning day as I found out how the families can interfere with the assessments that you are trying to conduct on the client. It is important that you tell the family what your job is and it is extremely important to know when to draw the line and not get into the politics that have nothing to do with you. It is important to do what you are there to do and assure the family that you are there to help the client and do your job. We kept working on the client from the day before, she had retained some of the information that we were trying to get through on hip precautions but we still didn’t feel confident for her to go home just yet so we preformed a cognitive assessment on her. The results that we got from this were concerning to us as they were quite low. Latter that afternoon she was issued with some equipment and was D/C and we will go and do a home visit tomorrow to see how she is going and to take some more equipment to her house for her aid. We also went on a home visit where we just singed some papers so that the client could swap the equipment that she had from s/term lone to l/term lone. On the way home from there we also stopped off and had a look around the hospice and a special school. I will spend some of my placement time there.

Day Two Wednesday 7/6/06:

Day Two Wednesday7/6/06:

Today was another busy day where we spent most of the morning working in ward 3. We worked with 3 clients and did home interviews or initial interviews with them to find out what there home was like and what they needed when they returned home so that they could live independently. After morning tea we went up onto Ward one. We had a challenging patient there which may have something to do with the language barrier as she was from a different country. She had had a THJR so we needed to assess her home and what she needed when she got home to assist her. We also told her about the hip precautions following a THJR, this was hard for her to follow and so this is when our problem started…..The next client we did a shower assessment on, to see how capable she was in showering on her own. After assessing her we thought that it was best that she be sent up to A&R for further rehab to regain her confidence and build up her energy levels before returning home.

Fielwork one: 2006

Day One Tuesday 6/6/06:

Today was a day of orientation into the hospital. Firstly my supervising therapist took me for a look around all of the wards in the hospital, after this I was taken up to Ward one where we would spend most of the day working in with the nurses and physio staff. I went to a MTD and there we had a meeting in which we discussed all of the patients that were on the ward. Today was a busy day on the ward as it had just been a long weekend. We went and visited a few patients two were being discharged today and the other will most likely be transferred to BOI hospital as there is a shortage of beds here, he had just had a (L) THJR. The other one which really interested me was an external fitting that was healing the calf/ankle from the out side. There were a few wires that were bracing the leg which were sticking into the bone to hold it in place. Ward one is a very busy ward as people come and go all the time after surgery. Because of this it is important to prioritise your patients as some need to be discharged that day. The other two wards that I will be working on are Wards 3-4. I start work at 9am and work until 3pm Monday to Friday.