Last 6 Weeks...

Time to talk about my final placement…

I was told that I was meant to be doing stroke rehabilitation (good because I luurvee stroke rehabilitation, bad because I've already done two such placements) but at the last minute, my placement was changed to TRAUMA ORTHOPEDICS (my original supervisor came down with Meningitis and it is unsure whether she would even be able to return to work as an OT).

ORTHOPEDICS – an area that I have never done, and have successfully avoided. Until now. Fixing broken bones following a strict protocol doesn’t rank very high up on my “exciting areas to work in” list. And obviously, since I’ve avoided it so far, it meant I had limited knowledge in this area.

Limited knowledge + very limited interest = poor performance.

My main problem was that I kept very much to myself and spoke only when absolutely necessary (meaning when someone else spoke to me and after I’d confirmed there so nobody else around and so he/she could have only been speaking to me *groan*) partly because (ok, I admit) some members of the team were really scary and intimidating and partly also because of my limited knowledge. How can I answer questions that I don’t know the answer to? I’ll leave you to imagine the comments I got in the “interpersonal skills” and “interprofessional communication” sections of my mid-way evaluation report.

The most frustrating thing is that my “lack of knowledge” has very little to do with my “OT skills and knowledge” (I was ok in that aspect), rather it was to do with my poor Geography of Scotland (This was the exact same difficulty I faced when I did my placement in Sydney). Very long story, very hard to explain but the crux of the issue is that we had to know where exactly the patient came from and what resources that area has so that we can liaise with the agencies there to prepare for the patient’s discharge home e.g. home modification or home therapy.

The easy ones were patients from America or from “far away” parts of Scotland like Edinburgh or Glasgow because then all that was required was to complete the transfer from hospital to hospital. Preparations for home were not a priority. It all becomes very complex when a patient is from the area of Aberdeen – is he/she from Aberdeen City or from Aberdeenshire? City and Shire have different services and referrals must be made to different agencies!

But after I got over the “communication” aspect of it (I learnt to refer to a map) and started to speak up and voice my opinions (aha! And once I started, there was no stopping me), I coped and enjoyed the rest of the placement. I would still say orthopedics is not THE most interesting area to work in (a lot of cases are similar and quite repetitive) but because it was TRAUMA (and therefore had quite a bit of DRAMA), the placement turned out to be really educational, perhaps more so than the other areas because my knowledge was practically zero and I had to learn from scratch…

Of course, there are HIGHLIGHTS as well… but till next time!