“What we call experience is often just a dreadful list of mistakes”
Poetically, this was the first post I saw on my Facebook timeline after class. Today, and our assigned readings, have really resonated with me. I taught nursing students last semester and my elective course this summer is on clinical teaching. The past two weeks we have been learning about clinical mistakes and resilience. The literature is 100% correct: in nursing school, we are NOT taught about our inevitable imperfection. We are NOT explained that mistakes can, should, and will happen during clinical rotations where the setting is more controlled and supervision is heightened. We, as nurses, are primed to be perfect and concurrently set up for failure. I left class today empowered with even more confidence in acknowledging that I am not, nor will I ever be, a perfect provider and that is OKAY. I won’t have all of the answers and that is OKAY. What is even better is admitting this. Cue this TED talk (below), which sums up some of my reflection on today – so I’m going to leave this awesome nugget right here.
Ayesha promotes working together with our patients to achieve our goals and her quote, “I do not know what is wrong with you, but we can figure it out together”, best summarizes today’s takeaways. I need to learn from while anticipating my mistakes in order to mitigate and prevent them. If I can encourage my students to do and emulate the same, I think we can change the culture. This behavior has the potential to be infectious and I’m hoping we talk about role modeling in our last few sessions.
I want to have coffee with my patients (or, more appropriately, apple juice).