Assignment you learned the most from?

Our hospice assignment really stuck out for me from my mental health clinical this semester. We were assigned a day at a hospice house or a day with a home hospice nurse and then had to write about the experience in a paper. It doesn't quite fit into mental health but I didn't mind and thought it was such a great experience to look at the other side of life and a different type of nursing. I'm not sure if most programs do this (I am in a BSN program) but I learned an incredible amount and thought this was a very worthwhile, educating, and eye opening experience that I will take with me throughout my nursing career.

In our Mental Health Nursing class, we had to do a big mental health assessment (MHA) on one patient from our clinical site. We conducted a long interview, analyzed the patient's records, assessed the patient's cognitive functioning, and analyzed the patient's medications. It took anywhere from 1 -4 weeks to collect this data, depending on how complicated the patient was. Then we typed it all up into a big 18 page paper. Although this assignment is pretty generic, it was really meaningful to me because it gave me a broader understanding of mental health care in America and the areas in which it is lacking. I was very fortunate during my Mental Health rotation because I was able to go to my state's largest public psychiatric hospital. I met and interacted with some of the most fascinating people, most of whom had incredibly heart-breaking stories. While this experience in and of itself was amazing, the MHA encouraged me to look deeper and helped me develop a stronger understanding of my patients. Even though it's been a few months since I completed the assignment (in fall 2012), I still often think of the things I learned from the assignment and from the patient I interviewed.

In general, I find the assignments that relate to and analyze our own personal experiences (like patient interactions or our experiences during clinical) most meaningful.

I was a lab, lecture, and clinical teacher and my clinical students told me the thing they got the most out of was a journal. I required each student to get a 5x7 spiral bound lab notebook and write me at least three sentences about their clinical day, every clinical day. They became great communications devices, and many of them wrote pages and pages. As a mental health person I am sure you know how therapeutic journaling is when you are processing great change in your life, as nursing school surely is. It also gave me a chance to learn more about them, their experiences when I couldn't be looking over their shoulders every day all day, and how they learned bes, and take the time to give them thoughtful written feedback. Great experience.

The other thing they hated at first but liked a lot by the end of the semester was the med math quizzes. Five quick calcs, five minutes at the beginning of clinical conference while I wolfed down my sandwich and guzzled a carton of milk (lunch break? clinical instructors don' get no stinkin' lunch break...). At the beginning of the semester they were getting 1-2 /5 correct..which scared them, which was good. By the end of the semester they were getting 4.8/5 right consistently, and a lot were doing 5/5. They hated it to start with, nobody else's clinicals had such a mean instructor, they wanted to talk about other stuff all the time...but then they realized that they were the only ones in their class who could reliably do med calcs. :)

I can only speak from experience... in my healthcare ethics class, it was mostly an open forum. I felt I learned a lot about myself from an ethical standpoint in that class. We covered topics about abortion, assisted suicide, stem cell uses, Planned Parenthood, etc, and how to talk to our patients about these issues. I learned a ton about how to talk to and open up to patients without crossing the proverbial line. I absolutely loved it! Not sure if you deal with things like that in your specific curriculum, but I really benefited from it. My two cents.