Starting placement

image is from little mochi blog, sourced 5/3/16.

I’ve now been attending my placement for 5 weeks, without blogging about the experience.  To start the ball rolling, I’ll review my notes from these weeks and just summarise my observations and reflections below.  Then I won’t have anything hanging over my head to catch up on and will be free to focus on the here and now…

3rd Feb 2016, Week 1

This was a pretty overwhelming day, where I focused on getting to know my supervisor a little better and was introduced to the hospital community.  On arrival to the community health building, I was kidnapped by the child and family health nurses who had heard about me and the project I will be working on.  They knew more about it than I did!  Obviously the gossip mill in the hospital had worked well in this regard.  I ended the day back in a meeting with my supervisor (I’ll call her “M” from now on) and these community nurses, sharing a little bit about the project.  We made a follow-up appointment for a month away to share how the ideas had progressed.

10th Feb 2016, Week 2

M and I reviewed the Industry Placement document that M had received from Cathy.  M  introduced me to the Core Competencies for Health Promotion Practitioners to help me to determine my goals and objectives for my placement.  This was a great idea, and really helped me to hone in on what I want to achieve from the placement.  If you’re reading this and are in the early stages of your placement, I’d recommend clicking on the link to help with this part of the Industry Placement document.

I was also introduced to the Breastfeeding Kit, which is a core aspect of the project I will work on.  Basically, the project entails working with the early childhood community, and other stakeholders, to improve the rates of breastfeeding in mothers who return to work at the 3 month stage.   The resources to support this have been developed, and children’s services in my area have received a copy of the kit, however M hasn’t had the resources (time) to support its introduction and implementation.  I’ll also help to determine the barriers to breastfeeding beyond 3 months in my local area.

17th Feb 2016, Week 3

Much of today was spent wandering around the hospital, finding the colour photocopier and preparing the hard copy versions of the Breastfeeding Kit to share with the child and family nurses in a few weeks.  I had one prepared example of it, and discovered that I couldn’t find some of the documents that were included in it anywhere.  Along the way, I ran into an early childhood director from my local area in the hospital, so I chatted to her about the project.  She discussed the facilities her early childhood service offers breastfeeding Mums, and she gave me a few ideas about some difficulties mothers have with continuing breastfeeding once they return to work.  This then helped me as I started to brainstorm where to go with the project, what I could use as methods to gain information and build community partnerships.  I emailed the local Australian Breastfeeding Association group to introduce myself and ask for some help finding resources that were included in the hard-copy of the Breastfeeding Kit I was copying to share with the community health nurses.

images sourced from ABA, 5/3/16

It’s mind-boggling how much time just copying and putting together folders of paper resources takes!  I was expecting to have this finished in about an hour – hahahaha!

24th Feb 2016, Week 4

This morning, M was booked in to present a session on “Eat it to Beat it” at a primary school in the region, so I tagged along to watch / help.  This is a standardised presentation developed by the Cancer Council that targets parents and aims to improve the dietary habits of the community.  A very strong focus of the presentation was the 2 & 5 message about fruit and vegetables.  There were only a handful of parents (mothers) turn up to the session, apparently this is normal in our area.  Apparently another Health Promotion Officer further south had 40 attendees at her session, which M was a little envious about.  I wonder what the differences in the community dynamics is?

images sourced from cancer council, 5/3/16

One pearler of a comment from M stuck in my mind.  On the drive back to the area, she mentioned that people can only attend to and retain so many health messages.  She said that 2 & 5 is so effective because it is so simple.  If people remember this, and strive to reach it, they have less room in their diet for the sometimes foods and will improve their nutritional intake because of this (and as a flow-on effect, their health markers).  We also discussed the focus on obesity at a policy level, and how she doesn’t like having to mention this as people tend to freeze up and expect to be chastised or told to eat less.  The word or concept acts as a road block to the health message as people feel shame about being overweight.

I had a reply email from the ABA representative and gave her a call.  She lives in the next beach around from my place, so I dropped in to her home to collect brochures and other resources after placement.  She sounded really excited about the project and has offered to help in any way she can.  It felt great to make some inroads into the community networks.  And I got to eat yummy frozen blueberries with her wild nudist kids!!

2nd March 2016, Week 5

Yay, I’m finally up to date!

This week I was busy pulling together the last missing pieces of the resources to share with the child and family nurses whilst finalising the project goals and outcomes.  It was really helpful to locate the documents from when the project was proposed to the manager of the public health team.  They shone a strong light onto the breastfeeding statistics for the region and the reasons the project was funded.  They also help to guide the direction of my project for the upcoming year.

M and I ended the day meeting with the child and family nurses to discuss the project and gain some insight from them.  I proposed developing a resource pack to share with breastfeeding mothers who are about to return to work, and asked them whether they could store the pack and give it to the relevant mothers.  I wondered if the nurses could do this as I’m aware of the difficulties the early childhood (EC) services have with storage.  It turns out that this is a problem for the nurses as well!  So, rather than have a collection of packs (which will require substantial funding and storage), it may be better to have example packs for both the nurses and the EC services to share with families.  There are many other aspects to the project, and gaining local information about the barriers to breastfeeding is important.  I now have to hone my ideas and “just do it” – organise the focus meetings, contact the EC services, reach out to the other breastfeeding and maternal support groups in the area…