The second week of my internship started on a normal footing of going through the daily routines with my mentors. My main goal of the week was to look out for the signs and symptoms and interventions and therapeutic measures that are given to children with mental health issues and have a meeting with my mentors to review the past week of my internship.

At the meeting with my mentor, we discussed wide range of things that constitute mental health issues in children. From the discussion I realized that most of the mental health cases in my internship unit are conduct disorder, depression, anxiety, ADHD (Attention deficit hypersensitivity disorder). Furthermore, my mentors and I concluded that from the third week, we are going to take one patient case every week and the things to look out for includes: need for care assessment, symptoms, therapeutic measures, medications, multi-professional team decisions etc.

Last week Friday was an interesting day at my place of internship, we had what is called `family day `,the patients ‘parents visited to have, breakfast, lunch, played games together, discuss with the nurses on the welfare of their children and the further health or therapeutic measures that will be put in place to enhance the wellbeing of their kids and thereafter the patients parents went home with their kids to spend the weekend with them and we are expecting the patients to come back to the ward by Monday. In my opinion I think such an event created positive bonding between parents, patients, and the multi-professionals in charge of giving care to the patients.

One critical thing I paid attention to during this week was the material handed to me by mentors to study and it includes: the nursing support observations that are made when a patient is admitted newly to the ward, this helps them to do a proper diagnosis and interventions. This includes:

Daily Activities:

-Does a child perform according to their age levels,

-How much guidance and support a child needs,

-Dining situations,

-Going to bed and waking up.

Functional and Operational guidelines:

–Age,

-Mental functioning,

-Social functioning and flexibility.

Interaction and Contact:

-Interactions related to other children,

-Adult reciprocity.

Emotional and mental well-being:

-Mood and mood swings,

-Self-esteem and self-image,

-Worries and fears,

-Empathy,

-Concentration,

Impulsiveness.

Co-operation with parents:

-Interaction between the child and parents,

-Parenting coping and resources,

-Parents ability to guide and support the child.

In conclusion, I had good feedback from my mentors, they applauded my attitude towards work and interest in mental health related issues and also encouraged me to keep it up.