Emergency Care in South Shields

My practical training placement is in children´s emergency care. I am doing twelve hours a day but only work 3-4 days/week. Up side is that I have more days off, but down side is that I am absolutely exhausted when I am finishing my work day. It is also quite creepy to use metro on night-time. There are many drug abusers and drunken people.

The oldest patient can be 15 years old and the youngest only few days old. In emergency room, we deal with anything from colds, the flu and stitches to car accidents and other traumas. The focus is on the specific problem or urgent need of the patient at the time of the visit. When patient comes in she or he will be triaged by staff nurse. Usually conversation starts like this: "Why are you here today? What have you done?”. Triage-nurse writes all the basic information about patient and possibly takes some observations like temperature, blood oxygen level, weight and blood pressure. After this patient goes to waiting area and a paediatric nurse practitioner or a doctor will see the patient.


What have I learned:


-I have learned for example about plastering, wound care, fractures, head injuries, diabetic, bronchiolitis, gastroenteritis and croup. 
-My English vocabulary has increased a little bit, but my speaking isn´t really fluent yet. Uh there is so many embarrassing situation when I have tried to mumble something in English.. :D


The best things are..

-People are so friendly. :)

It is weird that..

-Our department doctors are same age than me! (Some are a couple years older, but still very young.) One nurse is always kidding that she could be mom for all the doctors, because she is so “old”.  

-Here nurses wash their hands, but they use rarely hand disinfectant.

-Nurses and doctors write by hand and all the documents will be scanned to computer. I wonder   how they can read those..

-Everyone thinks that I am from Poland and nobody knows where Finland is.

           Last conversation about this topic:

*Man: Where are you from?

-I: From Finland

*Man: Ponyland?!?

-I: No from FINLAND.

*Man: I would like to visit in Ponyland.

-I: yeap… :D

I will put some pictures from the department when I have a permission to do that! See ya! :)