Final post

For my final post I want to review my project, my challenges and rewards, as well as my thanks to those who helped me this semester.

My project initially started with an educational intervention focus for adolescents with sickle cell disease, but evolved to incorporate health literacy and family centered care. Increasing health literacy has many benefits as it enhances a patients ability to make health care decisions and process basic health information. This is important for adolescents because they are faced with the challenge of transitioning to adult care and gaining autonomy in their health decisions. This project allowed me an in-depth look at adolescents who are faced with chronic disease.

The project was a fantastic experience and I wanted to outline some of the main rewards of my participation in the project.
Rewards:

• Working with patients and their families.
• Ability to attend traveling clinics and shadow specialists
• Improving professional skills in paper writing and presentations
• Exploring pediatric nursing as a career 
• Gaining experience in development of educational materials
• Ability to incorporate academic learning in a community setting
• My community agency and mentor were fantastic.
• Many others! 

With any major challenge there were a couple of challenges I would like share as well.
Challenges:

• Adolescents as a population are sometimes difficult to work with. They were both a reward and a challenge in the implementation of my project.
• Time constraints. I was not able to attend as many clinics as I would have liked to. However, the experiences I had were incredible.

I would like to give my thanks to my mentor in the project Kristen. She was a wonderful mentor and allowed me to shape a project within her area, supporting me with advice, guidance, and feedback. I would like to thank Children's Hospital for allowing me to attend their clinic and experience working with patients in their health care system. My final thanks is for my Honor's professors, Dr. McGuinness and Dr. Ivey, and my fellow classmates. Their feedback and support has been monumental in building and implementing this experience. Everyone should have the opportunity to further their educational goals through a service learning project as we have experienced.

A last look for you is my current poster for dissemination. Thank you for following!