Nursing Clinical Skills: Self-Reflection on Vital Signs Assessment

This paper reflects on a nursing student's experience with clinical skills, specifically vital signs assessment using simulated patients. The student describes initial anxieties and challenges encountered while practicing systolic and diastolic pressure measurements, heart rate monitoring, temperature checks, and respiration assessments. Despite the stress of working with dummies and the initial difficulty in obtaining accurate readings, the student highlights the importance of vital signs in predicting patient health risks. The experience fostered collaboration, highlighted the value of supportive mentors and colleagues, and reinforced the application of theoretical knowledge in a practical setting. The student concludes by emphasizing the intent to implement learned skills and maintain cooperative relationships in future professional nursing practice, seeking guidance from seniors and mentors when needed. Desklib offers a wide array of resources including past papers and solved assignments for students seeking to improve their understanding of similar topics.

Self-reflection on clinical skills
Clinical education in nursing can be depicted as a process of experimental learning
that involves relationship between patients, educators, students, clinicians and others.
Through the clinical practice, nurses can apply their theoretical knowledge and skills into
practical settings (Cioffi 2017). The clinical practice enables a student to apply their theory
into practice and also, it provides opportunity to enrich further learning through the
knowledge gained from the experience in practice. In this way, nursing students can apply
critical thinking as well as clinical reasoning skill (Watkins, Whisman and Booker 2016).
Here, in this paper, I will be reflecting my experience that I gained and also discuss how it is
going to help me in my future working practice.
In my clinical practice, I worked with some low fidelity mannequins or dummies
which were playing the role of patients who were referred to as “sim” or simulated human. I
had observed such clinical practice several times but never did it my own. Therefore, it was
my first ever experience of practicing with dummies. I was really worried about my practical
exam as in the laboratory we were using simulated patients or dummies to practice. Some of
the experiments were so problematic to perform such as measuring systolic and diastolic
pressure as we were using dummies. In case of human beings, it is easy to get a proper and
accurate reading through measurement but it was really stressful because in place of human
beings, we were dealing with dummies.
There were only six students and a couple of group was formed with 3 students in
each group. However, we all worked under the supervision of the mentor throughout the
journey of clinical practice education. Each and every student of the two groups was
measuring the vital signs. All of them were facing difficulties which made me feel more
nervous. I was constantly thinking that how I will be able to complete my checking with the

dummies. Once I felt, I cannot perform my task and was looking extremely stressful but my
fellow workers and my mentor supported and encouraged me to gain confidence. While
performing, I realized that not only the systolic and diastolic pressure measurement but also,
to get the heart rate is difficult.
In the clinical practice, the main skill to develop is regarding the assessment of
temperature, respiration and blood pressure. These are the vital signs to check first while
assessing any other kind of disease for a patient. Nurses are always required to assess these
vital signs and keep record in order to provide that to the physician for any further treatment.
According to studies, upon analyzing the vital signs, it is possible to predict the risks of the
patients’ health status. Therefore, I was nervous but excited to learn assessing the vital signs
in a practical setting.
The working environment was good enough to work calmly as well as patiently and
the noise level in the laboratory was also under control which is essential in acquiring an
accurate result after assessment. Once, I was worried as one of the student workers was
taking too much time to check the vital signs and I was thinking that it must be a difficult task
but later on, I realized it is happening because in laboratory, we are working with dummies
and it will not be the same when we will be checking vital signs of real human beings in
future (Griffin et al. 2016). I also took so much time when my turn came and it is really
stressful to work when we are not getting any results after the completion of the practical
assessment in the laboratory. However, I had a good collaboration with other and all of them
were supportive enough and cooperated throughout.
Finally, I can say that the journey was extremely stressful at the beginning and
however, the stress went on throughout the assessment. Even, at the end also, I became
worried for not having any result as dummies were used in this process. At the same time, it

is also quite satisfying that we could apply our theoretical and classroom knowledge in a
practical setting and exploring new challenges was quite exciting. Having a supportive
mentor and co-workers was an additional benefit which provides mental support to be
confident while working.
In future, while working as a professional nurse in my working setting, I will
implement the knowledge that I gained from this experience. I will always check the vital
signs as I learned its importance in this clinical practice (Achrekar et al. 2016). Also, I will
maintain a good cooperative behaviour with my colleagues and I will seek help from my
seniors as well as mentors in case of any issue.

References
Achrekar, M.S., Murthy, V., Kanan, S., Shetty, R., Nair, M. and Khattry, N., 2016.
Introduction of situation, background, assessment, recommendation into nursing practice: a
prospective study. Asia-Pacific journal of oncology nursing, 3(1), p.45.
Cioffi, J.M., 2017. Insight and discovery in clinical nursing practice. Collegian, 24(2),
pp.191-196.
Griffin, K., McLeod, M., Francis, K. and Brown, A.M., 2016. Do dummies make good
teachers? A paradigm shift for clinical educators. Collegian, 23(3), pp.321-326.
Watkins, T., Whisman, L. and Booker, P., 2016. Nursing assessment of continuous vital sign
surveillance to improve patient safety on the medical/surgical unit. Journal of clinical
nursing, 25(1-2), pp.278-281.