Team work

I earlier this year completed a prac at an Intensive Care Unit at one of the major teaching hospitals for my cardio placement. I found this to be an extremely interesting prac in which I was faced with challenges that I do not think I would have encountered on other cardio wards.

In dealing with Intubated and Extubated patients who were at times quite medically unstable it helped me a lot in developing some sort of clinical judgement and due to the support from staff learned to appreciate the individual presentation of different patients even if they were to have the same diagnosis.

I found this to be a great environment to work in and I think I learnt a lot from not only the physiotherapists, but also the nursing staff, doctors and other allied health team members (such as Speech therapists and occupational therapists).

I think that the reason that the ward seemed to operate so well was because of the exceptional team work and experience of all members of staff. The interaction between staff and patients was extremely high, with a nurse allocated to each room and the doctors were always on the ward. As a result the members of staff seemed ready to rely on each other in most situations, wether it be transfering patients or assisting in treating a patient / teaching students. As a result, my interaction with members of staff was much more enjoyable then on other placements, and I had no significant problems in treating patients that I can remember. If i was unable to see a patient at a certain time, the member of staff always explained why rather then just saying the patient was unavailable.

However I do not think that it is likely that other areas of the hospital would be like this;
having a ratio of 1:1 with the patient to nursing staff would be unheard of in other wards, with a ratio of 4:1 sounding more reasonable. In addition to this, the fact that patients in ICU do not have allocated meal times in most cases, or commitments off the ward (with the exception of certain investigations and operating theatre) meant that the patients were available for treatment most of the time they were on the ward. It would be very unlikely for any of us to have the luxury of a patient would be available for treatment at all times.
I suppose that the reason I decided to write on this was to reflect on how different things are on different wards. In an area like ICU where the patient is still too unstable for the ward, the main aim is to get the patient stable and then send them for further therapy, and staff are provided with the time and resources to achieve this. However once on the ward the patients time becomes more divided between the different facets of their rehab and their impending discharge. This in turn results in less available time for treating the patients and the possible conflicts that may arise when trying to utilise time for treatment while other staff may have demands for te patients time as well.