I'm stuck

Henny are you using a reflective model to structure your work, I usually find that it helps organise my thoughts and at least gets me writing. There are lots of models that you can use. Do a search for Johns model of reflection or Gibbs reflective cycle.

Oh Henny don't give up on us quite yet

Try some of these links, not sure if you are used to writing reflections, if not Johns gives you specific questions to answer which is sometimes easier when structuring thoughts.

Johns

Gibbs is a bit more simplistic and still easy to use, you just need to find what suits you.

Reflection

The above link is actually quite good, just bookmarked it myself it has a few other reflective models in there which may help

I am going to move your post to the student assistance forum as well, you will get better response in there

do you mean something like this. . .when i did my or experience (and this was over 30 years ago, but i remember it very well) i was observing the doctor, an orthopedist, removing a tumor from the center of a long bone of someone's leg. i remember how he used a sterile hand drill very much like one my father had in his garage. as he was carefully removing this piece of tumor with forceps through the hole he had made in the bone, it dropped from the forceps and fell on the floor of the or thus contaminating it so it could not be sent to the lab for analysis. he let out a couple of profane expletives. when i reflected back on it i realized that better precautions hadn't been taken to preserve the removal of this specimen, the sterile field had been broken (the surgeon really had been working too close to the edge of the sterile field so this accident happening was almost a foregone conclusion) and profanity is never professional.

i also saw another incident where the sponge and instrument counts at the end of a case were off. for a short period there was a bit of panic while all activity in the or stopped, like a tableau, and the counts were re-done. that time they matched with the number of sponges and instruments that they had started with and like a button got pushed, everyone went back to doing their tasks. years later when i was a supervisor on duty we had a surgery going on one night where an instrument count was off, the patient had to be x-rayed, and sure enough, a surgical clamp had gotten left behind in the patient requiring retrieval and a longer time in the or.

i think that perhaps your instructor is looking for incidences or breeches in protocol that the nurses would have picked up on. sometimes as a student it's hard to see these small breaks in protocol happening around you. these people identify and correct them so rapidly that you may have missed them. someone could have accidentally contaminated an instrument and it was removed from the sterile field before you noticed it and not one word was uttered. or people sometimes communicate with their eyes and bodies and a visitor to their or might not notice this. one of the reasons why everyone in the or is watching to make sure protocols and rules of sterility are being observed is because they can happen so quickly and unobtrusively that everyone there needs to be watchful.

medic2crna. . ."whilst" is the commonly used british form of the word "while" which means during or at the same time. the australians use that form also.

sorry offtopic, do you not use whilst in the US then?

On topic: brilliant post Daytonite................again

Sharrie, "whilst" is not part of the vernacular in my part of the USA. We don't hear it often, except in English literature.

sorry offtopic, do you not use whilst in the US then?

I've never heard it used where I've lived in Ohio, Kansas, Missouri or California. We always use the word "while". My grandmother was English so I recognize the usage of "whilst" though.