MGS RADAR

www.winhistory.de

Do you remember the installation of Windows 95?

At first you need to pull out a briefcase out of 1,44 inch discs to install your drivers for the CD-Rom or harddrive….after 3 hours of tweaking and tricking out the system, you had a working system….

Three months later, the situation was completely different…your system needed 10minutes to boot and the final solution was:

format c: (y)

If you want to have this feeling again, visit this site!

www.winhistory.de

Stephan

["If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear!"]

I just saw a link in one of my favourite medical blogs about a free youtube lecture from Harvard university, and the theme was very interesting to…

WHAT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO?

Why do I take this lecture?
As a nurse I’m always obligated to moral decisions. One of the biggest question is which patient is more in need of care and which patient needs more attention. I have to oversee different aspects not only medical and I’m the one who can/will or cannot/won’t switch buttons which open or close the pathways of an individual not known or personally related to me. I have done maybe thousand decisions in my little career and I will do many more. This subject is called prioritizing.

Many of you would think, that rational reasons like numbers or common guidelines are helping me throughout the daily moral deciding. Sometimes they might help you, but in many cases they are just confusing you and every nurse on duty will let the “nurses 7th sense” get involved, which sometimes tells you the different or just to re-focus.

Let’s take a look at this

http://www.justiceharvard.org/

Stephan

["If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear!"]

Pretty soon I’ll be on my night drive to the airport - marking the start of the holidays for my parents. No palms and beaches for me, but at least this week-end is a welcomed opportunity to switch the brain off and relax after a taugh week. I decided to reactive my old Armed Assault DVD, the Operation Flashpoint successor which I never finished and haven’t been playing for about a year already. And you know what? I think only THESE games can be as equally entertaining as they can be frustrating. Playing on the hardest (veteran) level I was in three hours not able to finish this damn mission. Still at the same point where I stopped a year ago. I might try the medium level (which allows you to save actually more than once during a mission) next time…

Oh and YEEEEAAAAH… we actually have an election coming up NOW.

Dr. Udo Brömme has my first vote for sure! My Germän schpeaking friends, have a look at these Harald Schmidt clips. I found last Thursday’s show both politically enlighting as well as prickling (in a fizzy candy way).

Daniel

http://www.google.com/chrome/?hl=de

Yesterday I installed the newest version of Google Earth and this included Google Chrome.

I’m very confident with this browser without any unessesary attachments….easy and fast..give it a try!

Stephan

["If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear!"]

I nearly got one year left until I can consider myself REGISTERED NURSE. If I look back at my last year at OUR school and the atmosphere that was around I see parallels and things in common.

Last week I looked at some of my mp3 files and videos I collected of my musical influences. I did the same with my favourite pc games and despite I know how old Iam I saw the years flewing by. I can remember my first day in 11th grade like it was yesterday, and sometimes I miss those days of leisure and fun.

Also I can remember the first course in my nursing class and my first ward, everything was new and everything was a challenge, some things are a challenge even today. Some people see my sidestep in nursing as a waste of time. I don’t think so, how much I hate that I cannot give patients the care they need, I absolutely love beeing a nurse.

My questionable future comes more closer next year. My training is over, next year I’m a professional and next year I have to make all the choices involved. But next year I have to make some decent career choices and that involves a lot of planning and even luck, what comes next, where will I be? Things were much more “safe” three years ago were I was in a comparable situation.

The challenges came to me automaticly, I had nothing I could rest on, no further job training and no further qualification. I needed something. Now I can see things much more relaxed, I have a job in which I can make money, I have a safe place where I currently reside.

The next challenge is not the challenge itself. I have to put myself in the line to attend this challenge, I could rest on my R.N. and say “What the fuck, relax you have a job and a training” but it would not be me, it would be somebody else but not me!

Years ago, everything was fascinating and new to me and my friends. We tried things out and made memories together…we went through a lot of shit and a lot of fun. Nothing too glamourous but we lived our lives.

Now these lives are a lot more…linear. We all have to put us under some kind of authority and we all have to put our lives in some kind of order. Something we never thought about 10 years ago…we all had our dreams and our plans but they were so far away.

I see the last years of my parents in the active job lives. My mother is retired and my step-father is in his final years. He is not in the position to change the world. They are not overall happy with the paths they have chosen, they are struggling with job related health issues and their live is a blurry, continouus substance. Something that I never want to do in my life…but talking is good, acting is different.

Let’s face the daily challenge again^^

Stephan

["If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear!"]

It has been almost 2 years from now on which I spent at the nursing school, it’s been a hassle sometimes but it has been a great value to me, especially my teachers (In germany they are not professors, Nursing is not an academic subject if you want to be registered, you have to so some kind of 3-year-training-program without any bachelor or anything else) and the people I spent my time with. My part-examination which is a test-run for the final tests are over today, it’s been hard especially the practical part was something that bugs me even today.

I did my thesis paper about the history of washing patients and the view of nurses by nurses…my thesis paper was great and it pointed out the middle of the downfall in german history of nursing education.

Today I wrote a test about the part III…a subject which is in most of the cases responsible for a failure in the registration process…containing nursing science, methods of science, law and nursing, nursing process, nursing theorys and so on…the test itself was the summary of all the things that really pissed me off during my school.

Grab some bits:

• The quality of sometimes very important subjects (e.g. intramuscular injections) in comparison to side-subjects like “hate and anger management” vary. In my humble opinion, injections are very important tasks since we can get sued for malpractice in such cases. What we got for this topic? Two pages of a leg which we had to colour out to mark the muscle and nerves and one very bad copy about the procedure of the injection. The rest was stupid, unreflective story-telling of this particular teacher which then stated “I really have no experience in injections”. The first time I injected intramuscular I was advised by my clinical instructor to look at my school notes, but in fact I never had something comparable.
• The best statement of our tutor if we complain about certain aspects is “This is impossible, I cannot think that they missed…” and in many (not all) cases this was the last response in such topics.
• Our teachers and our tests refer to the National Expert Standards or Nursing Practice which are guidelines how to handle certain aspects of our work. They are some kind of a golden rule. In 2 years we all speak about these standards, we all refer to these standards but we NEVER actually had them in front of us. We all speak about a cloudy guideline which nobody ever read and nobody ever handed out to us.
• We all have to do a care-plan for our practical exam. As much as I see the effort and the importance of a care-plan for patients, the step from theory to practice is not well planned because:
  - There is only a handful of nurses which are actually able to do a care plan
  - The few nurses who can do a care-plan do it after a curriculum of 1985
  - Even if they can do a care - plan…they don’t do it because they hate doing it
  - Even the clinical instructors who are trained to train us and who review our care-plans have no idea how to really do this.
  - I personally don’t know any teacher who did a care - plan after the 2004 guidelines.
  - Summary: The law arrogates something that nobody really can do and will do, and asks for a very good care plan which we will never learn from
  
• It is ridiculous to ask the students to buy a book, from which they will need 4 pages…especially if you have to pay 40€ for 4 pages.
• The particular teacher with little competence did a two - day seminar about diabetes mellitus type 1 and type 2. The main focus was on Type 1 Diabetes (because one of the sons has Type 1 Diabetes) which I only encountered twice in my whole practice and the therapy of Type 2 diabetes (over 75% of all internal-medicine patients have diabetes type 2) was the handout of a script from 1995 with medications given and the explanation of outdated insuline-pens. In some of our PBL - Classes, the teacher asked us about the therapy-scheme of Diabetes Type 2 and guess what, only a few interested classmates GUESSED the right answer.
• Sometimes I see a shifted main - focus. We went deeper in such fields as obstrietics, neonatal care and pediatric nursing then in other subjects. These fields require a vast ammount of special training, we still have to know something about this but it absolutely unecessary to know more about ped’s nursing than internal or geriatric nursing which is our main focus.

Well, given the fact that we don’t have the classic - class - attending courses anymore and given the fact that we have problem based learning for the whole third year I see some improvement…

Stephan

["If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear!"]

Today in my few breaks I had the chance of looking at my old school page:
http://www.gym-st-wolfhelm.de

Very interesting things going on, in fact only HALF of the shit written is a lie or just punctual over-estimation;)

There are so many things going on, that I can’t even recall what I actally did, so please excuse me, after next week the travel will go on!

Stephan

["If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear!"]