School of Nursing News

As told by Maike van Neikerk, 2nd Year Nursing studen, regarding her experience with the newly available Nurse Central App.

Over the Christmas holidays, I had a chance of a lifetime to fly across the world to Nepal to do a nursing internship. For two weeks, I had the opportunity to work on a neonatal floor taking care of twenty-five newborns by taking their vital signs, preparing their medications, assisting in their medication administration, and doing educational sessions for medical students, nursing students and mothers of the patients.

However, the next week I left to help at a village health outpost in Nuwakot. What I thought would be a “fun cultural experience” turned out to be the most challenging, yet rewarding nursing experience I have experience thus far. I was placed in the village outpost run solely by a community health volunteer, with no professional training. For the first time in my life, I was the most skilled person…. In the entire community. If that is not intimidating, this is: the village had no Internet access and I was expected to be fully knowledgeable on every drug that walked through the door, know how to conduct every physical assessment and know how to identify any disease/ abnormality based off of these physical assessments.

Just as I was in the health post wishing I was back at Dalhousie with my knowledgeable and supporting nursing professors and lab instructors by my side, I remembered the nursing App that the School of Nursing provided me. Nursing Central became my knight in shining armor for the next week.

Nursing central:

• Did not require Internet access, therefore I had full access to Nursing Central’s information anywhere.
• Had EVERY single drug that I encountered! While the drug books often did not have some of the drugs, and were time consuming to find the drugs, Nursing Central quickly told me everything I needed to know.
• Provided me with the re-assurance that I was completing comprehensive, proper health assessments.
• Acted as a perfect reference to look up information on patient’s diseases/ disorders, and the meanings of lab results that could infer new diseases/ illnesses
• Was a great calculator!

Who would have ever thought that my knight in shining armor would be a small little blue icon on my cell phone! Turns out for that week it was the entire village’s knight in shining armor, as well, as it enabled me to provide them with best care possible. Thank you Dalhousie School of Nursing – this App is absolutely incredible and provided me with the confidence to provide competent care.