I believe this team project will be accomplished through communication and creating equal parts for each team member. We will accomplish this through communication by creating a group chat through text, meeting in person to discuss the work, and creating a google document that everyone can work on. We will all hold each other accountable by breaking up the work equally and reminding members to finish their work by the due date. If someone is not completing their designated work or there are any other conflicts, the other team members will meet with that person and figure out a solution. The benefits of working with others are being able to break up the work and prove the best work for each member. There is less work for each member when everyone is doing their part. The barriers of collaborative projects are some members not putting as much work in as others and disagreements within the team. Collaborative projects will be useful now because in the field of nursing there are numerous members of a team working together to create the best plan for patients. Nursing is an interprofessional field, so working with others and figuring out the best way to partake in collaboration will benefit us in the future.
Month: January 2022
The use of an appliance like an ostomy bag can be very daunting for patients. They may feel embarrassed or uncomfortable with the situation, the appliance, and the ostomy diversion in general. However, the need to use an ostomy bag is very important when the patient has a bowel obstruction or an obstruction in the intestine and has an ostomy diversion. The purpose of an ostomy is to allow the patient to remove waste from their body and relieve built-up pressure from the obstruction. (Hinkle et al., 2022). My perceptions regarding ostomy care before taking part in the ostomy experience were very limited. I did not have a good grasp of what they were and why patients had them. I had seen a few in clinical last semester but never truly created a perception of them because I did not see enough.
The ostomy care assignment was created for students to gain more knowledge and understanding for patients with an ostomy diversion and ostomy care. We learned how to put an ostomy appliance on a patient by putting one on a classmate. We also learned how it felt to have an appliance like this by wearing the bag for 24-48 hours. Through this experience, I believe I gained a better understanding of someone who has had an ostomy diversion. I realized that having to live with this appliance can be very difficult and my respect for individuals with a stoma and ostomy appliance has greatly increased. I want to treat all patients with the best care possible, but I now understand that my care for a patient in this situation will have many layers. I will take the time to clean and apply the skin barrier cream when changing the bag or the appliance. I will also check in with the patient’s feelings towards their appliance and help improve self-image if needed. Overall, I will always try to provide the best care I can to all the patients I treat but through this experience, I believe my specific care for those with an ostomy diversion has improved.
My experience with the ostomy appliance between Thursday, January 27th and Saturday, January 29th was very eye-opening. After it was placed in roughly the middle of my abdomen during lab, I forgot about it for a while. When I got home from lab and went to change out of my scrubs, I realized a lot of the pants I owned were high-rise. This meant the waist of the pant was close to the middle of my abdomen too. Many of the pants, including leggings and jeans, were very uncomfortable to wear. I ended up wearing a pair of sweatpants and finding a few pairs of pants that were not as high of a rise to wear the next couple of days. After this situation, things were going smoothly until roughly 5 pm that night. It never occurred to me that patients with this device may struggle to play sports until I stepped into my locker room to get ready for ice hockey practice. Trying to figure out if the bag should be tucked into my pants or not became very difficult, especially when many of the girls on the team were confused with what I was wearing and looking at me a little differently than normal. I ended up solving this situation by tucking the bag into my pants. This situation brought two things to my attention, the difficulties that surround having to wear an appliance like this and playing a contact sport and the feelings of shame or embarrassment when people saw the bag. I managed to explain to my teammates that the appliance was an ostomy bag, and I was using this experience to better understand someone with an appliance like this. This situation made me very uncomfortable about wearing the bag and very anxious to present the device to others. I felt much better after explaining why I was wearing it but it made me realize how difficult it must be for patients to explain to family and friends why they have this device.
After hockey, my skin was more irritated, and the appliance felt like it needed to be cleaned from all the sweat that I produced on the ice. I cleaned the device and the surrounding skin in the shower and the irritation went down a little. I realized there was a lot of self-care that needed to be done to maintain a healthy site. I pushed myself to check the “stoma” on the site to make sure it looked healthy and to clean the device properly. These small things that patients must do to maintain the health of their skin and overall body may be overlooked by many. However, having to do these small self-care acts are so important for a patient’s ostomy appliance and stoma as well as their overall health. To me, these important but small needs must be very difficult to learn as well as remember to assess. When I care for patients with ostomy bags, I will make sure to help in whatever way I can to teach and help them remember to do these small, important things to maintain their health.
After I took off the ostomy bag on Saturday, I realized many things that I plan to incorporate into my care for others. I realized that patients’ self-image can become fragmented when they receive a device like an ostomy bag. I realized this when I presented my bag to others and they became very uncomfortable or said, “what is that?!”. I also realized how daily living activities for individuals can become more time-consuming and difficult. I saw this through playing hockey (which is a daily activity for me) and trying to clean my room. While cleaning my room, the bag, which was ¼ full, felt heavier than normal and the adhesive kept pulling away from my body. I realized that as a nurse these difficulties that I faced, were difficulties that many of the patients would/will face when they have an appliance like this. My perception of the need to understand the care I am providing through nursing priorities, assessments, interventions, and education increased. I realized I needed to assess the patient’s site and stoma more thoroughly than I originally thought and provide interventions based on those assessments. I also realized that this device, which I thought was not going to be so bad before I put it on, would be very difficult to get to use both physically and mentally for a patient. Due to this, I knew that patient education was a major priority to provide the best care possible.
This experience was eye-opening, and I recommend every nursing student to take participate in the activity. It truly made me realize the reality of having an ostomy diversion and having to wear a device. My perception for ostomy diversions changed throughout the experience but the major turning point was when I went to hockey practice and discovered the difficulties of wearing the appliance and the viewpoint of others. This experience changed the way I planned to care for clients with ostomy diversions. Now, I plan to create an even more holistic approach for those with appliances. My advice to future students that may partake in this activity or care for someone with an ostomy diversion is to understand that there are so many factors that go into a client’s well-being. Make sure to center your care around the person and understand that ostomy care is important but so is the mental health of that individual. My advice is to always include patient education with every intervention you do. The patient needs to understand why you’re providing the care you are and how they should participate in the care. I truly recommend this experience to every student nurse.
Reference
Hinkle, J. L., Cheever, K. H., & Overbaugh, K. J. (2022). Brunner & Suddarth’s textbook of Medical-Surgical Nursing. Wolters Kluwer Health.
As a student nurse, the quote “the world is your oyster” always speaks to me because I have had so many opportunities to see various nurse specialties throughout my years as a student nurse and continue to have these opportunities. This ability to see the different types of nursing has made me consider a couple of different areas of interest. I have always been interested in oncology, especially pediatric oncology. I volunteered at a cancer hospital, and I was amazed by the way the nurses and patients created such a positive atmosphere in a place that you would expect a lot of gloom. I found myself wanting to bring that positive energy to a unit that needs some uplifting. Through this specialty, I would like to learn more about how different types of radiation and chemotherapy affect young children and different nonpharmacological ways to treat these patients. One way I can learn more about these topics is through evidence-based practice. My assumptions of evidence-based practice are that nurses provide the most up-to-date care through advanced literature that is constantly changing. My ideas of evidence-based practice are that just like in the hospital, the written evidence is always changing. As a nurse, I feel as though I will need to keep up to date on new evidence-based practices as well as provide some research of my own to continue to learn and grow as a caregiver.
This Evidence-based practice course will teach me how to think more critically and review all the applicable options to create the best care for a patient as well as give me the skills to properly create my evidence-based material. I will be able to use these new critical thinking skills and writing abilities in my other classes as well as clinical by reviewing all the information I am given and applying the best choice for an answer or a patient. The Evidence-based practice course will help me learn how to create a research paper so when I am in the clinical setting as a registered nurse, I can perform research with my colleagues. It will also help me review the literature to find the best intervention and outcome for my patients.
Mental illness as well as mental health are two topics that tend to be more difficult for people to understand and discuss. There are many stigmas surrounding mental illness, I think there is so much stigma because of many different factors. The awareness of mental illness and mental health are newer topics of discussion, which I believe contributes to the stigma. Since these topics are more recent, less people are comfortable talking about them. I also think another factor that contributes to stigma is that mental illness is not something someone can see all the time. Most illnesses and diseases present in physical appearances, such as rashes on the skin. Mental illness some of the time cannot be seen which makes it much harder for an individual to understand. The factors that contribute to my self-stigma are not fully understanding about mental illnesses and accidentally stereotyping myself and others with mental illness. Another factor that contributes to my self-stigma is categorizing a person based on their mental illness, such as using the phrase “she is bipolar” rather than “she has bipolar.” These factors contribute to my self-stigma.
I think someone’s culture and religiousness does impact their response to mental illness. Being part of a religious/spiritual group can be a positive and a negative when understanding mental health and illness. When someone is part of a group, such as a religious group, they have a sense of belonging and a way to cope with hard times. However, religious/spiritual groups can also impact mental illness more negatively too. When someone has a set of rules to live by, such as the 10 Commandments, they can become anxious or upset when they break one of those rules or sin. This anxiety can create worse symptoms of mental illness and hurt someone’s mental wellness.
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