Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Module 4

Education is I believe the number one most important thing we do as nurses. Whether we work on a medical floor, home care nurse or psychiatric nurse which is what I do. I believe it is the best "medicine" we can give our pts. Knowledge is power. The delievery of education is important as well. We must remain humble and allow our patients to be heard as well. I work on a 33 bed acute psychiatric unit where there is lots of education going on. We educate on diagnosis, medications, healthy lifestyles, medical technology just to name a few. To not educate our patients is doing them is not truly treating the whole patient. We use many forms of education on our unit. handouts, skill groups, video presentations, the tv has a hospital education channel as well. Social workers are also on our floor daily to help and educate our patients. I use apps that help me with medications and labs. We use our computer to look up a mirad of different medical subjects.

As nurses and soon to be APRN's education and knowledge will becom even more important and I plan to use every resource available to me in order to better educate myself and my patients.
LINK

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Module 3

Searched: Sexual Trauma and PTSD treatment.
CINAHL is definately where my comfort zone is and find it easy to narrow searches and get full text articles (as well as it is easy to import into endnote). Pub med has great articles but they are not always accessable. I have never really stopped to think and use PICO technique before and plan to try to organize my information this way in the future.
P= problem
I= Intervention
C= Comparison
O= Outcome

I also searched NCH which I found to be a bit too broad topic wise and there were alot of articles that had absolutely nothing to do with the topic I was researching. Even after doing an advanced search it brought up alot of irrelavent information. Most of the information/articles were new which was great.

Google scholar search was interesting and brought me to more helpful overall information on the topic but as we know google is not always realiable. The biggest concern was the inability to access up to date information. I still felt that it was worthwhile to search google as it gave me an overall look at my topic. I would like a day where I could have someone who is very informed on searching the various indexes to show me all the different tricks.