My Worst Clinical Rotation (also my best?)

Let’s get real for a sec here…

I see a lot of posts of students being really excited for their clinical rotations. If you are a student out there that is not having the best time during a rotation I just want to say that I have been there.

Even though I deliver services in the home half the time now as a PT, my home care rotation was my most challenging one. I had problems with my confidence from my first rotation and my CIs were very nice to me (maybe too nice) and said that I will just get over it with time. When my second rotation came along, I brought my confidence issues with it. Not to mention the home care setting is very difficult because your environment is constantly changing, you don’t have all the resources you usually would in a hospital/clinic, you have to constantly make phone calls to their physicians and you are basically alone with patients who were recently discharged from the hospital.

It was the 5th week of my rotation and by this time I was given close supervision by my CI. When I read the patient’s chart I noticed that the OT who was previously there mentioned very shocking things in regards to the condition of the home. Once I arrived at the home I was a bit taken back by what I was witnessing. I didn’t know where to even put my computer down and the patient was asking me to sit on her couch with her, but I didn’t even feel comfortable doing that. As I was asking the patient questions, I could tell she didn’t know much about her own health condition, so I was thrown off by that as well. It is interesting to look back on this day now and how I felt because I was such a different person back then. My CI sensed that I kept pausing after each question and began speaking loudly over me which made me even more nervous. After we were done she said, “I expected better from you at this time.” Thank goodness we had to hurry and drive 15 minutes to the next location because I was about to cry when she told me that.

Needless to say when I was halfway done with my rotation, my CI contacted my school telling them I need to stop being so shy. I suddenly went from being a great student to having a critical incident mark on my CPI which made me a “bad” student.

I thought I was going to fail my clinical. My professors were really nice to me and said that they aren’t worried about me at all, but I just need to be less quiet. They were worried that this may affect my pediatric rotation coming up.

When you get a critical incident, you are required to have a phone call/email conversation with your school every week to make sure you are doing your best to improve in what area.

I would be lying if I say I didn’t count down the days until my rotation was over. I had friends who were loving their rotations and having the best time while I was like, “I’m going to suck as a PT.”

SPOILER ALERT I don’t suck as a PT lol

Even though it was tough times, I am so happy someone finally was like, “Mercedes, you need to be more confident or else patients won’t take you seriously.” After that I felt like I completely changed the way I interacted with my patients! I became a better person and clinician because of this experience. I don’t regret any of it and if I could go back in time I would let myself go through this again because of how much I grew from it.

Did you ever have a tough clinical rotation? What did you learn from it?