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.
Category: Research
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.
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.
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