First week at the biggest hospital in BC

So the week didn’t start out so good. It was rainy all week and sort of stressful to be back in Vancouver knowing that I had to move on the weekend. Just ask Cameron, I get pretty stressed when it comes time to move.

Also at the beginning of the week I didn’t have my usual supervisor (she had a couple of days off in lieu of working weekends). The other supervisor I got was great though, she is one of our TAs in class and she is a fantastic teacher. That was fine, but the director of Physio for the hospital wanted me to know that once my regular supervisor showed up if I needed anything to let her know. Basically my supervisor is really smart and is very respected and wants her students to be top notch physios and sometimes her high expectations can be a little much, so I was stressing on Monday and Tuesday about having her and not being able to meet her standards and having a whole other “UVic Water Lab Incident 2007” again.

But so far its been awesome. She is super smart and a great critical thinker and had been working for a decent amount of time so she has consolidated a lot of knowledge. Her clinical reasoning skills are tops. I am really excited to learn from her. Sure, it might be a bit more stressful or not as laid back and I will be kept on my toes and busy, but its so much better than having a preceptor who doesn’t care.

Also for me too I think its good to have a preceptor with a different personality type than I have. Its good to have an assertive, very energetic, take charge type of preceptor so that hopefully I can learn some of her communication skills and use them when my usual approach fails.

Also I really hate presenting and public speaking, and my preceptor has her students do either a patient education project or an “in-service”. So I chose In-service. Really. I am trying to grow here. So in week #5 I will be delivering a presentation to all of the hospital’s physios who want to attend and the 5 of my peers who are also at the hospital on placement. I haven’t picked a topic yet, but its probably going to be some sort of acute medical condition that I will research and deliver the information on.

I think the saying goes: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”