Your past experience, assumptions, and hopes for your future career will influence what you contribute to and gain from this course. Describe any nursing specialties you are interested in, what sparks that interest, and what you would like to learn more about that specialty. Describe your assumptions about evidence-based practice and what informs those assumptions. Reflect on how you will apply what you learn in this course to your other courses (classroom or clinical) and how this learning will help you in future practice.
When I first began the Accelerated Bachelor of Nursing program here at University of New England, I was keen on learning more about pediatrics and maternal health. While I do not have direct experience in either area, I enjoy working with children and young adults, and wanted to learn more about this patient population in the healthcare setting. I was equally interested in maternal health based on my own experiences with pregnancy; providing the same kind of comforting care for other women that I experienced seemed not only rewarding but something I felt I would truly enjoy. While I have yet to take either of these specialty courses, during my first semester, I learned that these areas of nursing require a deal of emotional balance due to some of the heart wrenching circumstances that patients’ may be experiencing. For example, my lab instructor described many cases she experienced in the emergency department of children who had been severely abused by their parents. Those stories stuck with me and made me question whether I would be emotionally strong enough to professionally disconnect from the patient and focus on providing the best patient care. While I am still interested in learning more about both specialties, I realize how important it is to gain experience and understand how I can be successful in delivering the best patient care regardless of a patient’s circumstance. It is my hope during this program that I will learn more about how nurses are able to provide a high level of patient care in these acute settings without becoming overly emotionally attached to patients, and how they address their own feelings or biases regarding the patient’s situation. My first semester has taught me to be more open to a variety of specialties without preconceptions.
My original perception of evidence-based practice is that it is a method in determining patient care that I believed created the best and most accurate processes and procedures that were universally applied regardless of organization. This assumption derived from my idea that best practices for patient care were consistent and widely understood amongst the medical team regardless of organization. Evidence-based practice provides a strong foundation for the healthcare team to make clinical decisions that support successful patient outcomes based on recent evidence and proven theories (Fineout-Overholt, 2019, p. 10). However, is not consistently implemented even when the evidence demonstrates improved patient outcomes, nor is the process of evidence-based practice widely understood by the healthcare team (Fineout-Overholt, 2019, p. 24). I learned that even with evidence-based practice in place, there are still gray areas when providing care because each patient is unique, and each situation may involve multiple factors that evidence-based practice may not have taken into consideration, such as contraindications or a patient’s preference for treatment (Fineout-Overhold, 2019, p. 22). Therefore, patient care processes and procedures are continuously evolving and being refined to establish better patient care for a wide-range of situations and patient preferences (Fineout-Overhold, 2019, p. 13).
This course in evidence-based practice will help me better understand how patient care processes develop utilizing the PICOT format, and how as a future nurse, I will have the opportunity to contribute to this process through my own nursing practice. It will allow me to rationalize patient care processes and procedures and develop a strong sense of intuition. Without understanding how decisions are made in patient care, it would be difficult to know why one process is preferred over another. This could lead to errors, negligence, or malpractice. During this program, having a strong understanding of evidence-based practice will allow me to be successful in other courses by understanding the “why” behind patient care processes and procedures. In the clinical setting, I will be able to observe how experienced nurses apply evidence-based practice, as well as form PICOT questions that address processes that may need to be updated to improve patient outcomes. This will help strengthen my understanding of evidence-based practice, and how critical this process is to successful patient outcomes. By utilizing evidence-based practice, I will be less likely to make an error or harm the patient during my nursing practice.
Knowing that there are still unlimited opportunities to improve patient care, it is exciting to think about being a part of the team that prompts these types of questions and evaluates whether a process or procedure could be improved to benefit patients.
Reference
Fineout-Overholt, B.M.M. E. (2019). Lippincott CoursePoint Enhanced for Melnyk’s
Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing and Healthcare (4th Edition). Wolters Kluwer Health.
https://coursepoint.vitalsource.com/books/9781975130152152
