Integrating Theory & Practice: A Reflective Essay on Nursing

This essay presents a personal reflection on a nursing student's clinical experiences, emphasizing the integration of theory and practice. The reflection covers various aspects of clinical training, including interactions with healthcare team members, challenges faced due to differing levels of expertise and opinions, and encounters with patient mortality. The student recounts experiences such as dealing with the death of a patient, managing workload imbalances, and the emotional impact of critical patient cases. The essay also addresses the importance of clinical experience in developing decision-making skills and critical thinking abilities, while acknowledging the emotional and psychological demands of the nursing profession. The student also reflects on how the clinical experience enabled them to learn things that they were never taught in class.

Personal Reflection
Integration of theory and practice is one of the key features of nursing as a profession as
well as a science. Clinical training is of very utmost importance to nursing education. It takes
place in a multifaceted social setting of the clinical surroundings. It prepares student nurses to be
able to know as well as do the clinical codes in practice.
During my clinical experience, I observed that interactions between health team members
could be quite difficult. This is because, working with a team necessitates having many skills
which encompasses understanding not only one’s particular role but also other people’s roles.
Most times good interactions between myself and other health team members were hindered by
unalike levels of expertise attainments to function as a team colleague, and varying opinions of
teamwork. For instance, there are various levels of student nurses and nurse aids and
consequently, this brings about a gap in the interactions. At some point a student nurse who had
far more experience than me subjected me to unspeakable workload just to prove herself to be
above me. People have varied opinions at concepts, so do nurses at the concept of team work.
Most of the ones I worked with only considered their individual performance first at the expense
of working as a team.
As a child, I had always feared the idea of death and dead bodies. I would not imagine
coming into contact with one even in my wildest dreams. Little did I know that later in life I
would take up the medical profession and such sights would be almost normal to perceive. Now
to the real story! During my first clinical experience at an older hospital, a patient passed on, I
was working the night duty. The deceased had to be taken to the morgue immediately, as that
was a custom there. Circumstantially, staffing was very tight that particular night and I had to do
this alone. The elevator groaned and creaked all the way down from the seventh floor to the

basement. It was very spooky and I was scared to death. I kept imagining that the deceased
would kind of resurrect and start talking to me on the way to the morgue.
My clinical experience has also put me in situations I never asked for. My decision to
join nursing school saw me swear to myself that at no point would I let a patient die on me. But
life happens, people die and unfortunately even as nurses we cannot really do anything about it. I
once worked at a burn center and a young girl was brought in with burns over 80% of her body.
My team and I worked desperately to save her but she just could not make it. I held her hand as
she died. Later that evening as I drove home, I thought of quitting. Fortunately, after much
consultation and deliberation I realized that I had to keep my emotions aside since other patients
were in line waiting for my attention. The death of the girl haunted me for a really long time to
the point of seeking professional therapy. I finally got over it though.
The clinical experience is sometimes coupled with feelings of regret about situations. For
me, most of my mishaps and undesirable experiences often happen at night. I was working night
shift at my very first hospital sometime in summer. As usual, staffing was really tight that night.
I had to attend to an entire ward of twenty patients on my own. I did my ward checks as usual
and nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. No patient had grave complications or needed
constant attention as most of them were asleep. I went back to the nurses’ center and closed my
eyes for what seemed like a second. Something startled me and I went back to the ward to do my
rounds that is when I realized I had fallen asleep for more than an hour. I was actually supposed
to give a certain lady some meds like half an hour earlier, only to reach to her bed and find her
cold. She was dead. What if I had administered her meds on the given time? Would she have
died still?
Plan

Generally, clinically experience is mandatory as it enables student nurses to get firsthand
experience of what they have been theoretically taught. Also the student nurses get to learn about
things they were never actually taught in class. It further helps them to acquire excellent decision
making skills and also enhances their critical thinking abilities.