Question

you are a student assigned to a 6- hour day in the clinical area. each time you have a clinical day coming up, you feel anticipation a look forward to working in the clinical area. however, you do not know what to expect. you think. what will my patients be like ? how will the day go . do I know enough to handle it ? do I need to practice any procedures ? it is hard to answer these questions until you are actually on the unit and see your patients. given the same situation, suppose that when you begin your clinical day, clinical instructor tell you that he will be in the agency asking questions, supervising, evaluating your performance- and perhaps from your perpective, making your life miserable. in which situation are you most likely to feel fear rather than anxiety ? explaining your reasoning.

Answer 1

From my perspective, both the scenario creates a fearful situation. When looking into the first scenario, a student entering for his/her first day clinical practice, it is true that he might not be aware of the situations such as how the patients will be, what he can do for them and how to explain to questions of patients. In this situation, entering for the first time to a clinical day creates anxiousness, fear and excitement. It is a real life experience to be a student as a nurse and to interact with the patient. Moreover, they have to interact with other medical staff members, what are the tests done in labs, they have to know about certain terminologies, medications and diagnosis to give education or to answer to a question of the patients. So, such situations create an inner fear of lack of knowledge or skills or chance of making mistakes evolve on students.

The other situation is an opposite to this scenario. The student have clinical experience and he knows about the patient, their conditions, diagnosis, treatment, terminologies and all. This scenario is not much difficult to the situation that I had explained earlier. Even though, he have experience in clinical practice, still he is a student and he might not be aware of all type of diseases and the type of question his/her instructor going to ask. For a student who have experience of clinical practice, the instructor may look on how he/she treat the patients or how he/she can able to care their patients. It is not an easy task. May be a tiny mistake on patient care can be a questionable.

So, from my perspective, both the type of clinical experience creates fear on students because of lack of knowledge or skills or may be because of less understanding on how to care their patients.