Supervise this

Throughout most of my placements I have felt as though I have been given very good support from my clinical supervisors. There was one prac, however, that I feel as though the supervisor did not spend adequate time supervising the students.

As a student I expect that a supervisor will be there to give you some support you may need. Especially in the early part of the placement. By the end of the placement I expect supervisors to step back and let the students take on most (if not all) of the work when it comes to dealing with patients. Sure, if there is something that a supervisor could demonstrate from her experience that we are not aware of then that is good for our learning.

I have found most of my supervisors good in this way. There was one though who barely saw me with any patients. My CCT saw me assess and treat more patients than my FCT, and my CCT was only there for a couple hours a week. The FCT was clearly taking on too many duties and did not have the time to adequately supervise students. She was covering someone else and had other people from her area to help with any problems that the students may have had. We were pretty much left to run part of the ward by ourselves.

Now this didn’t bother me in that I think it is good to be independent as once we graduate we will be expected to work like this, so I was not too concerned about this. And to be honest the supervisor did spend a bit of her time going over mini tutorials and things with us. However, she criticised me on several things. My CCT had actually been very happy with several of the things that my FCT criticised. I felt that she really did not have an adequate representation of my ability when making some of those comments. Some of the feedback was good early in the placement when she spent more time with us students, however, in the second half of the placement she spent very little time with us and had not had the opportunity to see the students develop their skills and work on their weaknesses. Yet she still gave the same feedback at the end of the placement.

I have always been a big advocate for constructive feedback. I feel it is one of the best ways to learn. Since my experience on this placement I have come to take some feedback with a grain of salt, and see things from a more global perspective, rather looking at all the different feedback I have received throughout the year. In the future I wont take things to heart from somebody who hasn’t seen enough of my abilities to make a valid comment about me.