2023 - Recap
so 2023 was a pretty daunting year for me initially because it was the year i would start uni for the first time since graduating high school the previous year, I used to ask myself questions of how it would be and friends, the difficulty of the degree and the class scheduling. However, after a while i realised it wasn’t that bad. After getting into the groove of things for a while it was like “this isn’t all mushy as i thought it would be”, and maybe that was a good thing??!! 😂 What i didn’t realise for pursuing the nursing degree at western sydney was the amount of forms we have to submit which included all our vaccinations till date, mask fit testings as well as getting complaint for clinical placements. The process of getting all this info to the school took a really long time to gather.
year 1 sem 1
the first semester wasn’t actually that bad. It did take some getting used to. I was on campus two days a week and worked on my other days off. My clinical class which was and still is called PPE (professional practise experience) run for four hours weekly and my other three subjects were theory based subjects which were tutorials run for 2 hours each. I had no lectures that semester. Most of my hardest obstacles was learning the referencing and how to correctly cite sources using APA 7. But as time went on i got a hang of it kinda 🥲.
Subjects and Reviews
Professional Practise Experience 1
This class was my clinical stimulations class. So basically, it was where I had my clinical stimulations and we would be practising our clinical skills on the mannequins. The skills we practised were numerous however the main key ones were our vital signs (called orbs for short - manual bp , temperature, respiratory rates etc etc), falls risk assessments, neurological assessments, activities of daily living (ADLs), DVT’s etc. I was very new to all of this because i have never had any clinical experience of any sort in my life so it was really interesting and intriguing. For this subject we had to purchase our western sydney nursing uniform as well as fob watch, manual bp with the cuff and stethoscope (i barely used my stethoscope cuz our clinical labs had some with were attached to our practise bp machine). i am not gonna lie, the manual bp was the hardest thing i had to do in that class cuz half of the time the pulses were hard to find and it was pretty confusing. It took me until the 7th week of the semester to finally get a hang of it. This class was fun, the classmates were God sent and so was our instructor , she was kind and understanding and thought us how to properly conduct assessments and do our nursing skills. I loved it and would rate the class a 5/5. For assessments, there were usually 3 and all were exams however the biggest exam that needed a lot of preparation for was the OSCE. Palms were all sweaty the day of this exam:
Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE): Now this was the biggest exam of this subject and for all future ppe subjects. You only have two attempts and it is on campus. So usually osces are clinical exams where you are given a scenario, your marker (the one who is supervising you during the exam) acts as the patient in the scenario and you have to treat them and do what ever clinical skills that is to be assessed on that day on the patient/marker. In the end you get a pass or fail. And this exam would be stuck onto you for first, second and third year. Mostly each year a different skill would be accessed as you progress through the ppe subjects so thats that. For all ppe subjects for nursing at wsu, if you fail unfortunately on the amount attempts given for each assignment, you fail the subject and you would have to repeat it again the following year. Unfortunately the ppe subjects are prerequisites. For example ppe 1 is a pre req for ppe 2 and so is ppe 2 for ppe 3 and so on. But the good aspect is that you get the chance to practise all the clinical skills in your class numerous times before the actual osce examination so it is important to pay attention and keep your head up. 🙂
The next two : Primary Healthcare in Action and Becoming a Professional Nurse subjects were all theory based and at times pretty boring. They just taught the fundamentals of nursing and the history of nursing. Topics like Florence Nightingale get introduced as well as professional communication and the code of ethics, conducts and registered nurse standard for practise all get introduced. The last one was Bioscience 1 which is more anatomy subject and it teaches all the body systems and introduces medical/anatomical positioning . At least bio 1 was very enjoyable and i learnt heaps but at times the class felt like it was dragging on forever even though it was only running for 2 hours haha.
Overall sem 1 was very enjoyable. Most of the theory assignments were in essay form or quizzes. Thankfully i didn’t purchase any textbooks because the uni library offers the hard copy for borrowing and also there are free pdf chapters to download on the uni library website. They cost so much $$$$$ and it wasn’t really worth it.
Year 1 Sem 2
This semester started to get more serious for me as more assignments became thresholds so it was important that I had to buckle down and study lots. (threshold basically means, if you fail an assignment you fail the entire subject regardless of whether you passed other assignments which weren’t threshold capped).
This semester I took the following subjects:
Approaches to Professional Nursing Practise
I found this subject to be more of a build on knowledge subject from the previous semester. It was more of a continuation from the first semester becoming a professional nurse subject. Due to this, I found a lot of the concepts to be repetitive and that made it quite boring for me.
Some of the assignments I recall we had to do included 2 intra session examinations, portfolio and some essays. They were all moderate in difficulty but was doable. The tutors were good in articulating the information to the students and ill give it a ⅗ due to mostly the repetitive aspect.
Professional Practice Experience 2
For PPE 2, it was a continual learning process, building on from topics in PPE1. This time we were introduced to medication administration including tropical, subcutaneous, intramuscular etc and more importantly emotion provoking topics of preparing the dead patients and palliative side of nursing. For this semester, we had our OSCEs as well as other assessments but most importantly our clinical placement which was exciting, looking forward to that. Clinical placement run for two weeks (80 hours total) and students were put in either hospitals (rehab wards) and aged cares. A friend of mine was lucky enough to be put in surgical ward and another friend of mine was put in a psychiatric ward. It surprised me at first as i didn’t think that there was a huge variation in the wards for first year nursing students to be placed in since well we were first year students. But i guess it helps with our learning experience so thats a wonderful thing. I was put in a geriatric rehab ward at a hospital which i worked at for the next two weeks. It helped with shape my perspective on nursing being able to practice some of my skills effectively and seeing things from a patient’s perspectives. The nurses on the ward were really supportive and understanding. A con of my experience on the ward was that i allocated an afternoon shift for the entire two weeks which started at 1:30pm till 10pm and on afternoon shifts there was no major incidents or clinical interventions which were happening in the afternoon. Most of them would have happened in the morning shifts when we went for the afternoon handover. So it is a bummer for me as I wished i would have seen more if i was allocated a morning shift instead but unfortunately most of the actions had happened in the morning so the other students which were allocated morning shifts had a lot more practice and seen so many things but its fine. Hopefully for future placements i'll get the opportunity to see some more action. I rate this subject a ⅘.
Bioscience 2
This subject (you guessed it…) was a continuation of bioscience 1 from sem 1 and this time it introduced the concepts and topics of pathophysiology, microbiology as well as hints of pharmacology. It was really interesting because i found a huge correlation of a particular topic which was immunity and year 12 biology mostly module 7. Immunity (adaptive and humoral immunity) were the biggest main topics of this subject. So to whoever that is thinking of taking nursing at WSU, do biology because it helps heaps with the bioscience subjects that you would potentially take when you embark on this course. Bioscience 2 will receive a rating of 3.5/5 mostly because of the threshold final exam which give me the sweats but I passed so am really thankful 😂😅.
Person Centred Care Across the Life Span
This subject just introduced the concept of providing nursing care towards different age groups. We took a look at case studies across the semester of different age groups and discussed in groups on what interventions would be best appropriate for them. It was in my opinion pretty basic and mostly common sense subject but its still important as nursing is a really diverse career in which you would be dealing with diverse people so it’s helpful. Assignments took mostly in the form of quizzes and essays/reflective writing. Ill give it a ⅗.
So for next semester, the subjects ill be taking are:
Professional Practise Experience 3 (PPE 3)
Pharmacology in Nursing
Health Variations 1 (HV1)- Introduction to Alterations in Health.
Evidenced Based Practise In Nursing
Knowledge Journeys—> (for the bachelor of creative leadership component)
So updates would be coming soon as I commence this subjects so have a great day… Until then ….😆