Whilst on my orthopaedic placement, I had a certain situation with one of my supervisors which I had a problem with. Part of the day on this ward involves running an exercise class for patients who have had knee replacements, and another separate class for those who have had hip replacements. I had only watched one of the hip classes and was then asked by this supervisor who was only watching over us for the day, to take the hip class. I felt very unsure as to what I was meant to do, and was given no guidelines by him as what to say. To start with, he was ten minutes late for the class so I was left standing waiting for him, and in that time I started to talk to the two patients who were participating. When he eventually came in, he pulled me aside and said that I should never have started the class without him, and did not seem to care when I said that all I had been doing was talking with the two patients. As the two patients had been in the same class just the day before, I did not think it was necessary to repeat everything he had said the day before.
The class seemed to go ok, except that it finished really early. After that class, this supervisor told me I had done everything wrong and should have done better, and why had I not given the patients all the information that he had done the day before. I really felt so upset as I felt I had received no guidance before the class and was being treated unfairly. I felt that as a supervisor, his role should have been to make sure I knew what I had to cover in the class and to ask if I was unsure about anything.
I did not really speak to anyone about this as I did want to rock the boat. But the more I think about it, the more I wish I had told my actual supervisor so I could have gotten some advice from her.
In the end I just decided to take it as a learning experience, as I realised there will always be people you work with that you don’t agree with or get on with. I have decided that in the future I will make it my mission to find out exactly what is required of me and ask as many questions as necessary. And I also realised in class situations such as the one I took, it is always better to provide as much information to patients and you will most likely repeat yourself, but with people with no medical knowledge, this is usually necessary to get the point across.
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I am having the same problem at the moment with my supervisor on my paeds prac. There's no problem with her supervising its more the fact that I haven't seen enough kids for her to supervise me. I have had a few hands on treatments with her, but I think she thinks I will gain more experience by just observing and having a cuddle with the kids?? I spoke to my sister in law who is a dietician and supervisors a number of students. She made me realise that sometimes you do get people that don't have enough experience with students and don't know how to deal with our problems and our questions. I think I've always had a vision that all supervisors know everything but sometimes they don't know everything and we have to let them know when there's a problem for our experience and from them to learn from the problem.
I think that it's inevitable that will sometimes be a clash between us and supervisors. The problem is usually communication (same as in most marriage break-ups) and I guess the trick is being confident enough to talk to the supervisor before an issue turns into a problem. It's easy to say in hindsight and some supervisors definitely make it easier than others but the real art is working out what issue is worth talking about and which ones just to let go. Probably just another thing that we need to learn as we go...
I actually had a misunderstanding with my supervisor during our second week. I'd gone through one of my patient's doctors letter with them early during the day and they had mentioned that my propsed treatment plan was too vague; so for my second letter I made a concerted effort to be more specific with my plans and provide example exercises. So when i went through the 2nd letter, they then said it was too detailed. By that stage( and given i was generally not having my best days) I had had enough criticism and probably didnt respond appropriately to their comments.Needless to say, they actually came out- quite bluntly- that I should get a clinical tutor because they were feeling tension between us and didnt like it. I personally didn't know there was such a big problem and was a bit put out that they said all this to me whilst there were several other students and a physio in the same room. In the end, we managed to talk the problem through;oddly enough, my surpervisor thought that I felt they were inadequate and didn't know anything, which was not the case at all. So I was only struggling with not having definate or clear guidelines as to what they expected within the doctors letters whilst the supervisor thought that I found them inadequate. So Despite being quite surprised by the whole incident, I found it quite amazing that a supervisor could still have feelings of insecurity,and how I'm glad that despite struggling whether or not to bring it up, that they did decide to bring up the problem with me so that we coudl talk it through and ease the tension for the rest of the prac.
In the end, they wanted a general treatment plan within the doctors letter, but wanted me to verbally state the exact treatment plan for the following session. Easy to be done, after I now know thats what they expect!
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