For second-year Nursing students Joshua Moore and Claire O’Friel, caregiving is all about compassion.
“Illness is not just the absence of health,” Moore said.
Moore and O’Friel both said they believed in a holistic approach to caregiving, or the idea that effective health care combines medicine with compassionate caregiving. This semester, they are both beginning to put these skills to practice for the first time in clinical rounds, which may be daunting as they have only practiced clinical skills on other healthy nursing students in the classroom.
“During fall semester, we learned clinical skills like taking vital signs — we do these on each other, even practicing injections with saline,” Moore said.
Moore performs his clinical rounds at Martha Jefferson Hospital, a local nonprofit hospital. O’Friel does her rounds at Health South, a rehabilitation center that acts as a part of the University hospital.
“The classroom was different because we were practicing on healthy people,” O’Friel said. “At Health South, even if I’m terrified, I have to make the patient calm and keep myself together.”
In order to create a comfortable and calming atmosphere, nursing students often follow a routine when meeting new patients.
“We usually start by introducing ourselves and asking the patient how they’re doing,” O’Frield said. “My go-to is humor, so I try and make someone laugh, and I think that’s easier for me than trying to be very serious.”
However, the true challenge of clinical rounds lies in combining compassionate caregiving with clinical skills and challenging coursework. To do this, nursing students must integrate humanity and scientific knowledge.
“Our first year, we learn the anatomy of the body and what happens in a healthy person,” Moore said. “Then first semester of second year, we learn how to assess a person and figure out their complaints.”
Figuring out patients’ complaints includes taking patients’ vital signs and other quantitative measures, as well as communication with the patient to understand what they are feeling.
“I used to think nurses just bathed people, but when I started shadowing nurses, I realized they really put their heart into it,” Moore said.
O’Friel said the experience of clinical rounds teaches nursing students what roles they will play as part of a team of caregivers that must collaborate effectively.
“The whole healthcare team works together to make people feel good,” O’Friel said. “If someone is not on par with communication it makes it harder on the patient.”
Both students said they have found their calling giving effective and humane care to patients.
“Anyone in our class could be a doctor if they wanted to be — it takes a special person to be a nurse,” Moore said.
O’Friel said that studying nursing has been challenging as well as rewarding so far.
“We’ve had a great time so far,” O’Friel said. “There’s something for me about the nursing school that has made U.Va. my second home.”
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