What am I doing here as...

A nursing student!

So for the ones that didn't knew, I'm studying to become a nurse. I have had two years of school already and I have two years left. So I'm right in the middle of it.

When I was younger (and I still do) I watched programs about the hospital all the time and my dad worked as a nurse at the ER. So when I made the decision that I wanted to be a nurse, it wasn't a surprise.


Before we came to Finland we had to choose our courses. One of the options was to do a clinical practice here. I immediately knew that that was what I wanted to do. See how the health care system works here in Finland, notice all the differences between the working environments here and the one in the Netherlands. But most of all, get more experience as a nurse in different work fields.

In the Netherlands I had an internship at a mental health institution for half a year and during the summer I stayed there to work and got a job at the home care. With saying this, I can already tell that that is the first thing that differs with the nursing study in Finland. When you study nursing in Finland you have a practical for like five weeks and then you go to the next place for a practical.
In the Netherlands, or at least at my school, I had my first practical in my second year of the study and it lasted for twenty weeks.

I think that in general the practicals here in Finland are the same as in the Netherlands. You can get a look at this specific work field and you get guidance from one of the nurses there.
The only thing here in Finland is that you can't really communicate with the patients, because most of them don't speak English. That was the one thing that frustrated me so much. I wanted to talk with them, have a chat, participate in the conversations. You really have to find your place, and have the courage to ask as many things as you want and dare to ask if you can do stuff or help with something. And with that I struggled sometimes, because I didn't really knew what was normal for a student to do during their practical here in Finland. But after some time I found my place and did as much as possible and suck all the information into my brain. In this weeks I already learned so much and saw a lot of new things, things that I probably won't see during my practicals back home.

Sometimes it is really hard, but afterwards I'm happy that I made the decision to do practicals here in Finland.

While I'm writing this I just started at my third and last practical here. I'm staying at this place for two weeks, just as the previous ones. The one that I'm working now is a place where elderly people come to spend their day. They participate in group activities but also get rehabilitation therapy.

My first two weeks of practical I spend at the gynecology polyclinic at the University Hospital. This one I found really interesting. I attended a surgery, got to see the IVF and ICSI laboratory and could be part of many appointments with patients.
After these two weeks I attended dental surgery for two weeks. I spend my time here in the operation theater, saw three or four surgeries a day and got to practice my clinical skills. I learned a lot about anesthesia and even got the chance to be a scrubbing nurse and take someones wisdom tooth out.

I think that doing clinical practice abroad learns you a lot. You can see the differences between this country and your home country, you can get a glimpse of a lot of different work fields, learn more abut the culture and language, but most of all you can grow your knowledge and grow as a nurse and person.   

Nähdään!

Aniek