A critical incident is an event that can be either negative or positive. The incident or event has to have a significant or powerful impact on the person it is effecting. There are often many critical incidents that occur in the nursing field that are both positive and negative. I am going to talk about one critical incident that I experienced that was very positive in my maternity clinical rotation.
This semester for my maternity clinical rotation I am at Baystate Medical Center on the maternity unit every Tuesday morning from 7am to 1pm. I had one clinical day where I felt as though I made a big impact on someone and I felt like I was a real nurse that day. I was caring for a patient and her baby on the postpartum floor …show more content…
I have learned a lot about breast feeding but I have never actually taught someone hands on how to do it. Luckily, I had my instructor there and she was able to help me teach this new mother how to get the baby to latch on to her breast. I watched everything that my instructor did and made sure I listened to all of the questions and answers that were asked and given. While in the room this first time, the baby did not latch. My instructor told the patient that the baby was tired and we would try again in about an hour. That is when I went into the nurse’s station and found all of the information that I could find on breastfeeding. I asked a couple different nurses about what to do when a baby isn’t latching and some information that I could give to this new mother to make her feel better about the situation. I was nervous about the baby not latching and wanted as much information as I could get so that I could help my patient as much as possible. A few of the nurses at the nurse’s station thanked me for helping with this patient and being thanked by a nurse made me feel like I was making a big impact. It really made me feel like I was one of them, that I was a …show more content…
She was day 1 postpartum and had a history of anxiety. With that being said I looked into the morbidity and mortality rates of postpartum women and found that psychiatric disorders are the leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in the postpartum culture. According to Oates (2003), there is a 15% chance of the incidence of perinatal depression. Although depression doesn’t always mean it is going to lead to death, a postpartum woman with postpartum psychosis which can occur after postpartum depression, has a much higher incidence of death than a postpartum woman with just postpartum depression not leading to psychosis. My patient lived at home with her husband with both of their parents close by. They said that her parents lived on the same street as them and his parents lived in the same town as them. They had a nursery set up at home and they would be bringing the baby home to the house with just them living in it. Both parents seemed very prepared to be starting a family and they had a lot of family and friends supporting them. They both work full time and have no