Discuss a clinical experience in which you had to incorporate one or more learning styles such as visual, kinesthetic, and auditory. Explain the outcomes and how you created an effective learning experience.
I use at least one of these learning styles daily, if not all of them. I’m going to use a recent example of a new device we have in our emergency department. Many hospitals are steering away from Foley catheters and that is why we now use the Purewick external catheter. Up until the other day I’ve never even seen one of these devices except on the computer. We all knew they would eventually show up because we had to do a net learning on them. Using our net learning system, I was able to watch a video and read step by step directions on how to properly use this new device. This was very helpful for everyone that prefers auditory and visual learning. Me on the other hand, I prefer to physically touch the device and set it up so that I can get comfortable with it. That is why I’d say I am more of a kinesthetic learner. “These people will use phrases such as ‘let me try’, ‘how do you feel?’ and will be best able to perform a new task by going ahead and trying it out, learning as they go. These are the people who like to experiment, hands-on, and never look at the instructions first!” (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2018). Once the devices arrived our charge nurse opened one of them so that we could get proficient with it. This helped me because I was able to set it up to suction and dump water on the external catheter to see how it worked. After using all three learning styles I was able to successfully use the new device on one of my patient without error and I felt comfortable while doing so.
