As soon as I came up to the floor I got a chance to know a little bit about my nurse’s patients and was able to pick out a good candidate for another head-to-toe assessment. I got a chance to follow the nurse for his morning medication administrations and see how medications are retrieved from the OmniCell (medication storage). One of the patients was slightly aggressive when we came in to give her the morning medications and even refused some of them. The kidney transplant recipient required no assistance from us and was headed home in the early afternoon hours. That left me with an older lady admitted for a gastrointestinal (GI) bleed to complete an assessment on.
When I was ready to move on in and perform the head-to-toe assessment on my new patient, my assigned nurse came down to the room with me. I brought my papers and he logged into the computer to simultaneously complete his morning assessment for the patient. As we walked through the computer-based assessment, he allowed me to listen to the patient and compare results with him so that I could complete my own assessment based on the same information that he gathered. I thought it was really neat that he took the time to go through everything with me and provided me feedback whenever I had a question. I greatly appreciate that!