I think working in a med-surge floor will provide me with a great baseline of nursing skills and knowledge that can transfer to other areas of care as I progress in my career. Although I wouldn’t say that I’m fascinated with med-surge nursing I can understand it’s importance both to patients and to me as a healthcare provider.
I am interested in primary care/ family medicine because it seems to serve a special role as the “hub” of a person’s care and management of disease. Your primary care provider is the one of the few physicians that you will have a long-term relationship with, as opposed if you went to an urgent care or emergency room to be seen for something. And although there are certainly times when the emergency room is your best option for care, that can’t replace the importance of having a provider who will continue to manage your care in the long term that you can continue to see.
I think hospice care is interesting as a field because it seems like such a departure from the rest of nursing. Hospice nursing is about giving patients the best day they can with the time they have left, which doesn’t always mean curing them or attacking their disease. Patient’s are the sickest they’ll ever be while at the same time grappling with some of the most important questions humans have ever asked like what happens after death and what does it mean to have a meaningful life. There’s a beauty in helping someone transition into the next phase of their life while at the same time there is a lot of responsibility. I don’t know if I’ll go into hospice care but if I do it won’t be until I know I have the technical and emotional skills to help patients the best I can.
Evidence based practice is an extension of the scientific method that seeks to apply scientific knowledge to a clinical setting. To use evidence-based practices is to ask questions to find results, and then to take those results and apply them in the real world. Evidence based practices are practical with the aim of producing change for patient outcomes. I initially thought that that EBP was synonymous with quality improvement, and every similar to research. But after doing the interactive module I can appreciate the importance of clinical decision making that is unique to EBP.
I think this class will help provide us with a systematic approach to investigate questions that we will run into while caring for patients. I hope this class will also help put us in the mindset of looking for new research, even outside of our classroom education. EBP also values a nurses own clinical expertise that is gained through their experience as a healthcare worker. It’s an inclusive process that recognizes knowledge from different sources.
To use evidenced based decision-making is to ask questions and reflect on your current practices and to take an active role in challenging them. That could be in asking other nurses, or looking at existing research. It means that you recognize your own areas of uncertainty and to gain confidence by using the best methods available. I think a mindset geared towards improvement would be useful outside of just a classroom or clinical setting and would also have good use in our everyday life.
