Recently I was confronted by my supervisor about the grammar, wording and tidiness of recent home exercise programmes and patient reports that I had made. This supervisor likes reports to be written some what "wordy" and for HEP to be personal and very easily understood. She did however warn me of this personality trait on the first day of placement. As she was going though all the corrections she wanted me to make to the reports and HEP I couldn't help but to feel frustrated. I had spent the last 5 weeks getting used to writing hospital notes and trying so hard to make all notes as short as possible only to now be told to not abbreviate increase with an arrow but to write the whole word.
I don't know if you guys are finding yourselves in similar circumstances but I feel like every placement I go to I spend the whole time trying to learn how to write patient notes specifically how that facility or particular supervisor wants. Then once at the new placement I have to start from scratch all over again. With this current supervisor I don't feel that I handled the situation all too well, becoming somewhat defensive and not taking the advice for its true merit. Although I know that I am not the best english student in the world I feel that supervisors should be more open to different styles of writing sometimes or at least aware that we may be used to writing in different ways.
Later that day I apologised to my supervisor and tried to explain my feelings about the situation. I think it is a very important skill to be able to adjust your reporting methods to suit the facility you are working in, the various health professionals you are reporting to and the type of patient you have. Does anyone have any ideas, views, similar circumstances they could share and any suggestions of how to deal with such a situation?
3 comments:
I haven't had a situation like this because so far all my supervisors have been reasonable in what they expect with our notes. But I agree that if a supervisor is going to be specific in what they would like in terms of documentation, they should discuss this with us at the start of our placement so that we know what they expect which will help avoid future confruntations.
Tough one Kellie, but well handled.
Perhaps all of you would find it easier to ask each supervisor at the beginning of your placements what they expect in this area. You could preface that by saying that you have found that different facilities use different styles and you'd like to comply with their style.
It's difficult moving from placement to placement so rapidly in 4th year. It gets much easier when you start a longer and more permanent job.
What do you think?
Trudi
I think that it is fair enough for the supervisors to want the sudents to create reports to their standards, after all they are the ones that are dealing with it after we go. At the same time however I think the supervisors should be abit more aware of the situation that you mention, the fact that we are moving around so often and therefore be abit more open minded.
I will definately be clearing this up with supervisors early at every placement from now on though.
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