Essay On Internship Experience

The most meaningful experience for not only week 7 of the internship but for the whole internship has been seeing a patient reach their goals. This specific patient was one of the first patients on the intern’s caseload. This patient that was admitted to the facility for a CVA. This patient has decreased attention span and has struggled to complete any two-step task. Her goals were to improve her attention span by decreasing the number of redirections required to complete a simple two-step task. Also, the patient was to increase the amount of time that she is focused on a single task. As the sessions started the patient continued to struggle to pay attention to complete the given task. The intern tried to minimize the number of distractions …show more content…
When the patient would get off of task the intern would hold up the stop sign and remind the patient of the task that the she was asked to complete. Then when those two did not help improve the patient’s scores, the intern tried changing the tasks. As the sessions continued the patient made slow progression but the intern was worried about the patient meeting her goals. By the last session, the patient had met all of her goals. This took a lot of hard work, patience, and determination from the intern. This was important for the development as a therapist because it taught the intern that there is not a simple fix for everything. Sometimes when working with patients the intern will have to try many different mediums to help each patient meet their goal. It may take extra patience and determination to work with these patient’s but when you see them achieve their goals it will be very …show more content…
For cooking planning sessions the patient will meet with the Recreational Therapist or the intern a day or two before they are going to complete the cooking session. During this planning time the patient will decide what they would like to cook, write down the ingredients, and any equipment they will need. Also, during this session the recreational therapist and the patient will discuss the process that is needed to cook the dish and if there are any adaptations that will be needed to be made. If there are adaptations that need to be made the recreational therapist and the patient will discuss how they will make these adaptations. For this particular patient, she was active in the assessment process and would answer my questions and was interested in doing a cooking session. When the patient got to the Rec room for the session the next day she would not look at the intern, she would not answer any of the intern’s questions and did not want to participate in the session at all. This taught me that patients also have bad days just like everyone does. When patients have bad days the intern will need to work to try and get the patient to participate. If the patient is still not wanting to participate, then the intern may have to try again to get the patient to participate in the planned session later in the day or on another day. If the patient is still not interested in the session, the