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For one of the courses I help with the field placements for, I get to hear some of the most insane batshit stories to come out of said placements.
It takes a LOT for someone to be booted from their field placement early, I might add. When that does happen, their case is assessed on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes we'll offer an alternate placement, other times it's basically "So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn goodbye!
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Enter Sucky Student, who is doing a postgraduate refresher course of sorts (So she'd been out of the loop for a while and needed to do the course to get back up to speed). She had, from the beginning, been complaining about various aspects of the course she was in. First week of her field placement, we get a call from her mentor. Turns out that the student was threatening to withdraw and wasn't coping, as well as feeling like the staff in the area she was in were against her - or so we thought.
What had actually happened was that the student had nitpicked on what she thought was bad practice and submitted an entire laundry list of complaints to the place she did a field placement at, and had generally been rude and disruptive to the staff. She also submitted the same complaints to US and then wanted to know what WE were going to do about the complaints with the place she was at! We made it pretty clear that if she submitted the complaints to the place she was at, any updates were between her and the facility, not us. While we didn't disregard the complaints, we DID make it clear to the facility that we would be doing a re-education session later down the track with them to clarify things. (The other student in that particular area did fine)
So, she comes back, we have a meeting with her and opt to give her a slight break before she goes and does her second field placement a few weeks later. This was at a very different facility (Facility B), with the view that she would repeat her first placement afterwards at yet another facility (Facility C).
While I'm interstate handling stuff at the conference, I find out that Sucky Student had been removed from placement at Facility B. When I get back, I discover what actually happened and THIS one merits its own list.
- She was generally rude and disruptive to the staff to begin with, feeling as though they weren't performing up to HER standards and actually threatened to report every single one of them to the medical board. (Whether or not she actually did that is another matter)
- She also threatened to report the facility she was at to the regulatory authorities for what she thought was "bad practice."
- The incident however, that actually got her removed (and does tie in with the other two above), was that one of the residents at the facility she was at had been admitted to hospital. She overheard (not sure if it was deliberate or not) two of the managers talking about it in their office and the words "end of life directive" popped up. So what does she do? She goes around and tells the staff AND the resident's family that the resident had died, when in actual fact, the resident was very much alive!
Meetings are had, and Sucky Student is STILL complaining, this time about our own practice, claiming that we discriminated against her on age and/or race grounds (she was white, the other students in her class were not), we didn't do enough to support her and that we didn't check the facility thoroughly enough. (None of which are true)
The end result for her?
- She gets expelled from the program and is prohibited from doing any further study with us in the future
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- She will be likely getting reported to the medical board as well (there were some other behaviours not mentioned which mean that we're required to do a mandatory report to them on "possible risk to the public" grounds)
- I also checked her registration today on the medical board website. Her only option to be allowed to practice again was to do our long program. We are currently one of the only places in the state offering this program. She's basically screwed herself over
It takes a LOT for someone to be booted from their field placement early, I might add. When that does happen, their case is assessed on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes we'll offer an alternate placement, other times it's basically "So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn goodbye!
"Enter Sucky Student, who is doing a postgraduate refresher course of sorts (So she'd been out of the loop for a while and needed to do the course to get back up to speed). She had, from the beginning, been complaining about various aspects of the course she was in. First week of her field placement, we get a call from her mentor. Turns out that the student was threatening to withdraw and wasn't coping, as well as feeling like the staff in the area she was in were against her - or so we thought.
What had actually happened was that the student had nitpicked on what she thought was bad practice and submitted an entire laundry list of complaints to the place she did a field placement at, and had generally been rude and disruptive to the staff. She also submitted the same complaints to US and then wanted to know what WE were going to do about the complaints with the place she was at! We made it pretty clear that if she submitted the complaints to the place she was at, any updates were between her and the facility, not us. While we didn't disregard the complaints, we DID make it clear to the facility that we would be doing a re-education session later down the track with them to clarify things. (The other student in that particular area did fine)
So, she comes back, we have a meeting with her and opt to give her a slight break before she goes and does her second field placement a few weeks later. This was at a very different facility (Facility B), with the view that she would repeat her first placement afterwards at yet another facility (Facility C).
While I'm interstate handling stuff at the conference, I find out that Sucky Student had been removed from placement at Facility B. When I get back, I discover what actually happened and THIS one merits its own list.
- She was generally rude and disruptive to the staff to begin with, feeling as though they weren't performing up to HER standards and actually threatened to report every single one of them to the medical board. (Whether or not she actually did that is another matter)
- She also threatened to report the facility she was at to the regulatory authorities for what she thought was "bad practice."
- The incident however, that actually got her removed (and does tie in with the other two above), was that one of the residents at the facility she was at had been admitted to hospital. She overheard (not sure if it was deliberate or not) two of the managers talking about it in their office and the words "end of life directive" popped up. So what does she do? She goes around and tells the staff AND the resident's family that the resident had died, when in actual fact, the resident was very much alive!
Meetings are had, and Sucky Student is STILL complaining, this time about our own practice, claiming that we discriminated against her on age and/or race grounds (she was white, the other students in her class were not), we didn't do enough to support her and that we didn't check the facility thoroughly enough. (None of which are true)
The end result for her?
- She gets expelled from the program and is prohibited from doing any further study with us in the future
.- She will be likely getting reported to the medical board as well (there were some other behaviours not mentioned which mean that we're required to do a mandatory report to them on "possible risk to the public" grounds)
- I also checked her registration today on the medical board website. Her only option to be allowed to practice again was to do our long program. We are currently one of the only places in the state offering this program. She's basically screwed herself over
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