Charge Nurse Experience Essay

Being the charge nurse for a day is a great opportunity for us as nursing students to experience how important is to coordinate nursing activities and delegation to improve patient care. It also allows us to develop a more critical thinking by looking others’ fellow students’ actions and learn from what they do.

Personally, it was a new experience that made me feel more confident of my role as a nurse, helping my classmates in anything that they may need, going around into each of the rooms and checking on each patient condition and listening what my classmates were finding during assessment made me forget of the pressure I do sometimes feel when I have my own assigned patients. In this opportunity, I totally forgot of that pressure and I started to recall more information that I was finding regarding the patients’ condition and also, notice things that we as students sometimes omit when we feel overwhelmed.

On the contrary, I felt confident in what I was doing; helping my classmates in anything that they may need like doing wound dressing change, reassessing abnormal vital signs after prompt interventions, keeping track on I&O's, discussing about medication included in patient’s treatment, and suggesting strategies to improve comfort for the patients were some of the occurrences I had during the day.

Moreover, I try to help my fellow students whose patients were in bed rest since they need more assistance to perform AM care and lifting the patients. Also, I focused on those whose patients who had abnormal vital signs that had to be reported to the primary nurse to continue monitoring. In addition, I had to look for a new patient assignment for one of my classmates since her patient had scheduled a dialysis in the