Holy – school has sure been hit into overdrive these past few weeks. We have started the course called “Caring for Individuals Experiencing Common Health Challenges”. This course is designed to introduce us students to the “Anatomy and Physiology” of the human body, it also teaches us what happens to a person’s body as they age and how to care for people in all aspects of their life (mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually). We started off with learning basic word structure for medical terminology and the basic structures of cells , I found this very helpful and a good kick start to the module we were about to begin.
We have been learning all about the different body systems (11 to be exact) and what happens to people’s bodies as they age. This is very important to learn, as a Health Care Assistant you are normally the first contact between your client and yourself and you need to know things to look for and beware aware of any changes that you may notice. These changes could be objective or subjective – this means that you either notice something about them like changes in behavior, rash or they mention something to you about how they are feeling).
I like how the course prepares us for what to expect and things to watch for like looking for bedsores and how to identify the early stages of one and/or implementing preventative actions to keep them from forming or how to look for signs and symptoms of a urinary tract infection. These are all things that we as health care assistants need to know for our job and to help take the best care of our clients that we can. You have to remember that by not understanding the body and its functions it could interfere with how you care for your client and could lead to you missing signs and symptoms of something or not knowing what to look for which could in turn have a bad end result for your client.
You really do learn just about everything that can happen to person as they grow older, not just what happens to them physically but what happens to their emotional state as well. Further on in this course we are also going to learn how to work with clients and their families that are in a Hospice (end of life care) and how to make their last stages of life comfortable and peaceful.
This course is no joke, there is a lot of information that you need to learn in the 6 weeks that you have to learn it but it is all so interesting that you want to keep learning more. I think what helps me the most with this course is the Instructor, She is a doctor and just a wealth of knowledge and really helps us to understand everything we are learning. This course really gets me excited to go and work in the field. I can’t wait till practicum when I get to put all my knowledge and skills to the test. I find it so interesting to learn all the different parts of the body systems and how the body functions day to day – our body is truly an amazing system!
