Our class schedule has been a bit wonky for the past four weeks, and we’ve all been more than a little bit stressed with some major assignments and assessment pieces. The semester is officially over!

I have a lot of studying to do before my exams at the end of June. Check out the massive stack of reading I have to get through! FYI for any wannabe midwives… these books are great, but have a heavy Aussie lean in terms of policies and practices. The bones are good, but a lot of the rules and policies will be different in other countries. In these last four weeks, we covered a lot of material:

Biology:

We learned about the life cycle and the female and male reproductive anatomy and physiology. We also discussed aging and the ways in which an aging population has affected the care of nursing and midwives. This is a topic which we will cover in depth in future years, but the basic introduction was fascinating.

Lectures:

There were a couple of funny lectures. We had one in particular that stands out; they brought in an experienced nurse/midwife who works in rural Australia to talk to us about cultural competency. This is one of the very few spheres where I would confidently say that we knew more than our instructor. It was one of the most diverse rooms that I have seen at the university, and the students I was able to speak with afterward were shocked at the kind of language she used. We were vocal about our displeasure at that lecture, and our regular instructors understood that it wasn’t the right way to go about teaching cultural sensitivity.

IBL:

Our final IBLs were uneventful; so few people came that they merged our already small classes together. It was an opportunity to chat with the instructors and other students, and share some of the experiences that we had on our final weeks in placement.

CBL:

Our final CBLs were assessments. In the first, we had to demonstrate our technique for Vital Signs, taking them on our instructor (or on a mannequin) individually to ensure that they knew our technique was appropriate. In the second, we demonstrated the steps involved in abdominal palpation. Both were relatively simple and we received lots of support from the instructors. They used the OSCE technique, quite popular among nursing schools: