What sort of teaching is done in your nursing role?
I currently work in Same Day Surgery and Post-Anesthesia Care Unit. The teaching that I do most of consists of controlling post-op pain. There are varying degrees of patients who either want to manage their pain with narcotics and understand that it is ok to take them or patients who do not want anything to control their pain because they fear addiction. It seems to me I spend a lot of time discussing pain medicine and when it is appropriate to take pain medicine and when the patient should begin to wean themselves off. Doctors don't do a very good job of educating patients regarding this, they simply write out the prescription for what the patient wants and walk away. As I have worked in this role for 2 years now I have seen a lot of physicians prescribe a considerable amount of pain medication and in my opinion I think they do it so they won't get phone calls for more in the middle of the night, on a weekend, or when they are busy in clinic. Now that I have been on that soap box I will get off and discuss some other aspects of teaching, I teach about caring for extremities after orthopedic surgery, post-op care after general surgeries like gallbladders and hernia repairs, gynecology procedures, and all aspects of ENT surgeries.
Is there any nursing role that does not involve teaching in some manner? I would definately say no, no matter what role a nurse is in you are always teaching. This may be in mentoring, administrative, floor nursing, surgery, ICU, etc. Nurses are always caring for someone and teaching, its ingrained in us, we even teach when we are not at work.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
Module 2
I used PubMed as my electronic index and this was very helpful when accessing my clinical problem of treating diabetic foot ulcers with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I found this to be a narrow topic that produced good information. This information was useful because it produced citations from medical journals and I set limits for randomized control trials which compared hyperbaric oxygen therapy with traditional therapy, this narrowed my citations down to 11.
The guideline index I used was the National Guideline Clearinghouse. This was not helpful in my search at all. I never had any results from my clinical problem and I tried to be more broad in my terms and entering diabet* for the disease/condition. I chose to do this so this index would not only look up information for diabetic, but also diabetes, diabetics, etc. This also did not help. I also omitted the term hyperbaric and just simply entered oxygen therapy, which also produced no results. The index recommended I truncate the terms, which I already had with diabetes. Just for fun I wanted to see what information National Guideline Clearinghouse did have on diabetes so I looked under Endocrine System Diseases then Diabetes Mellitus, which produced 83 guidelines. This produced a general list of guidelines for treating patients with diabetes, like how to give SubQ injections, diabetes in pregnancy, and primary prevention of kidney disease. Thus, my narrow search of hyperbaric oxygen therapy would never be found in this index. I feel like this is information we should know coming out of school and we shouldn't have to look this up.
I chose to use Google Scholar as my web search engine and surprisingly I did not get back thousands of citations for my clinical problem, only 22. But, I did put a limitation on the search: only search in Medicine, Pharmacology, and Veterinary Science. When I put the same search terms into regular Google and performed the search I was amazed that my citations were 22,500. I did not put limitations in this search criteria. Google Scholar produced some of the same results as PubMed, however many of these articles do not come in full text or as a free download. Some citations are around $20 per article. This route is not cohesive to a graduate student, I will be using PubMed through the library or EndNote to look for articles in full text.
The guideline index I used was the National Guideline Clearinghouse. This was not helpful in my search at all. I never had any results from my clinical problem and I tried to be more broad in my terms and entering diabet* for the disease/condition. I chose to do this so this index would not only look up information for diabetic, but also diabetes, diabetics, etc. This also did not help. I also omitted the term hyperbaric and just simply entered oxygen therapy, which also produced no results. The index recommended I truncate the terms, which I already had with diabetes. Just for fun I wanted to see what information National Guideline Clearinghouse did have on diabetes so I looked under Endocrine System Diseases then Diabetes Mellitus, which produced 83 guidelines. This produced a general list of guidelines for treating patients with diabetes, like how to give SubQ injections, diabetes in pregnancy, and primary prevention of kidney disease. Thus, my narrow search of hyperbaric oxygen therapy would never be found in this index. I feel like this is information we should know coming out of school and we shouldn't have to look this up.
I chose to use Google Scholar as my web search engine and surprisingly I did not get back thousands of citations for my clinical problem, only 22. But, I did put a limitation on the search: only search in Medicine, Pharmacology, and Veterinary Science. When I put the same search terms into regular Google and performed the search I was amazed that my citations were 22,500. I did not put limitations in this search criteria. Google Scholar produced some of the same results as PubMed, however many of these articles do not come in full text or as a free download. Some citations are around $20 per article. This route is not cohesive to a graduate student, I will be using PubMed through the library or EndNote to look for articles in full text.
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