Just Go With It

Category: EBP 1 Posts

Final Reflection

What I have learned from the team project is that nursing requires collaboration and equal contribution from each member. I’ve also learned that nurses can be the pioneers of composing or enforcing new skills that can contribute to patient care. It is also important to recognize that instituting new guidelines into large corporate-run hospitals can be a difficult task and requires persistence, which I think is a trait that all nurses should have. Quality improvement projects not only seek to contribute to patient care but to also protect those of whom providing the patient care by giving them the best resources available to provide that care effectively. I think I am a strong resource in analyzing articles and being able to find the qualities that make the article relevant and qualities that may work against it (such as sample size, longevity of study, etc..) Overall, as a team member I believe I bring good perspective, am reliant, and feel as though the group I worked with to accomplish this paper would willingly work with me again.

Appraisal and Synthesis

From developing and researching our PICOT question, I have gained an acute awareness of the worldwide crisis of maternal mortality. Our findings have shown that of all industrialized countries, the United States ranks last for the effective management of maternal mortality. This is, in partial, due to the lack of developed protocols and the trepidation of hospitals to take it on. Hospitals may be apprehensive to take on the implementation of maternal hemorrhage protocols, also referred to as safety bundles, because of lack of appropriate studies, funding, and resources, or is not a large maternity hospital. Our analysis of many studies found that utilizing maternal hemorrhage protocols did not change the outcome of maternal mortality. However, we did find evidence that the ways in which these studies were performed contained limitations and are in need of multiple study replications. Due to there being one maternal health to 100,000 births, this would need to be formatted as a large-scale longitudinal study to ultimately determine if safety bundles would effective. As a future nurse, I think I would be more confident having set guidelines if a emergent situation were to occur. Yet, there is always a possibility that a patient may not meet the protocol guideline requirements and in those instances it would be up to the physicican to determine the appropriate care.

Team challenges included formatting the synthesis portion and maintaining a ‘one voice’ kind of writing style. Ultimately, our group worked well together and maintained an open dialogue that helped us turn our draft in on time.

Developing PICOT…

Since choosing our PICOT question, my group and I quickly found it challenging to find relevant data articles pertaining specifically to our question. Upon this discovery, we had attempted to alter our question and try to make it less specific to a population. We actually found our altered question to be more difficult to work with (in terms of finding articles) and we were overall unhappy with what our question had morphed into. Therefore, we changed our question again yet still utilizing the same theme. Now, our question is more oriented towards safety and less towards population disparities. Now finding research articles is much easier and the articles that we do find have data that differs from the other and we are able to discern the pros and cons of each study. There were numerous times throughout the question making process that we all felt overwhelmed. I think what ultimately set us straight was being able to converse with eachother in class and narrowing down what we all felt would be an interesting topic to research.

I have a great team to work with. We’re all flexible and willing to work around each other’s schedules. Fortunately, we all really like the new PICOT question we are working with and I think that also makes it easier to work in conjunction with one another. We all recognize the importance of each of our classes and our willingness to do well in school ultimately makes this group effective together. 

The Journey of PICOT

I am in a group with 2 other individuals, one of whom I know from clinical and the other I have yet to get to know. Our communication skills have been successful so far in terms of planning out time to meet and form our question. We will hold ourselves accountable via the honor system. As adults who wish to pursue careers in nursing, we need to be able to look upon ourselves to get our tasks done. In the real world, no one is going to do our work for us and no employer will keep us if we fail to do so.

As individuals with different opinions and interests, we will need to formulate a question that we all find interest in. As a collaborative project, this may pose some conflicts as we need to ask a question that we all find important and will enjoy researching further. We will narrow down common interests and continue to do so until we come to a conclusion of an appropriate, yet clinically relevant PICOT question.

In future nursing practice, communication and teamwork is vital. Our ability to work with others will be reflected in the composure of this composition. My hope is that we will all be responsible for our own actions and contribute to this assignment with equivalence.

Thinking about the Journey

I’m interested in dermatology. There isn’t a particular instance that sparked my interest, perhaps my interest comes from the skin being visible to others and therefore disease processes can be seen on the surface. I’m big on first impressions and your appearance is the very first visible impression that someone can have. As a result, our skin can be an insecurity and as someone who feels that way, I’d like to help others who feel that way too. I’d like to learn more about how our skin is affected by our everyday exposures and things that can help preserve our skin and keep it healthy to avoid disease. I also find Labor and Delivery to be interesting and this was sparked by a brief interaction in a previous clinical. Something about being a part of such a special moment in someone’s life makes me believe I would have an important role in the world.

My assumptions about evidence-based practice are that it is rooted in biology and the mechanism by which disease processes work can be explained through science and research. In this course, I hope to be to learn communication techniques that I can apply to my interactions with patients and interprofessional collaboration. I hope to be able to settle the nerves of patients with facts and improve healthcare outcomes.

css.php