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.
Author: Avery (Page 4 of 6)
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.
Volunteer work at the Preble Street Food Pantry Oct 1st (4 hours) and 17th (4 hours) 8 hours total.
The clinical population for the Preble Street Food Pantry is the homeless population of Portland, Maine. This population would include adolescents, young adults, middle-aged adults, and the elderly. The primary focus of the food pantry is preparing food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to give to the people and families in need in the greater Portland area.
There are many Social Determinants of Health that are relevant to the clinical population. Two concerns are economic stability and neighborhood and built environment. Both of these Social Determinants of Health are relevant for the clinical population because neither are stable with a homeless population. The people in need have no place to live or sleep so the neighborhood and build environments are very limited as well as their economic stability. I would advocate for these clients by helping them find homeless shelters or stable living. I would try to work with the area and clean it up to provide a safer outside environment. I would also help the clients apply for jobs to help stabilize their economic status.
Within the food pantry, everyone is working together to prepare food for the clients. One way that incorporating interprofessional collaboration could create positive outcomes for the clients is by interprofessional teamwork and team-based care (IPE Competency 4). These positive outcomes for the clients could be achieved by having a nurse or provider help give out food in the community and provide care to clients that are in health care needs. One of the most problematic issues within the homeless population is not being able to receive health care. The clients could receive health care by having health care providers tag-along with the distribution of food.
Throughout clinical this semester, I met so many welcoming and kind individuals. Each patient made a difference to me and made an impact on my clinical experience. I hope I was also able to make an impact on their lives as well. One patient that I felt I left an impact on was someone who had been at the facility for a while and did not have many supporters.
This patient has been at the care facility for a very long time and had hardly any visitors. When I was assigned this patient, my main goal was just to give them someone to talk to and spend the day with. I spent the day helping this patient with activities of daily living. They joked about the breakfast that the facility gave out and I helped clean sticky fingers from the syrup. They also allowed me to brush their hair and play cards with them. I knew that my main goal was to give them a day that was just about them. Since the patient seemed to be lonely, I strived to speak with them as much as I could throughout the day. I could tell they were greatly enjoying their time with me, and I was happy that I was easing their burden ever so slightly.
At the end of the day, I circled back around to the patient’s room. They seem to be waiting for me and I ask them how their day was going. They said that they had been waiting for me to come back to see them and were glad I stopped by again before I had left. They said that they appreciated how much time I took out of my day to spend with them and that they were so glad I was their student nurse for the day. I was happy that I had help but was sad that I couldn’t spend more time with the patient.
I did not realize how much of a difference I had made in that individual’s life until the next time I was at clinical. I was working with other patients that day but decided to stop in and say hello to them. They were extremely happy to see me and had said they had started doing some of the fun things we had done the week prior, such as playing cards. They thanked me again for spending the day with them and showing them ways to keep this situation fun. I realized that my impact on them that day had truly helped them, and I was grateful for the experience.
Throughout the process of writing the medication reconciliation paper, I learned a lot about different medications, some of which I already knew about through class. The topics we were focused on were safety concerns and teaching the patient. I was very conscious of safety concerns for the patient because she is elderly, which can exacerbate some of the adverse effects of the medications. Most of the safety concerns are related to the renal and cardiac systems. Another system that I did not take into consideration but had adverse effects to Simvastatin was the hepatic system. These systems are always concerning and should be monitored when administering medication, especially with an elderly patient.
Another concern to me that was not related to the adverse effects of the medication was that the patient was not fully aware of why she was taking certain medications. This is concerning because patients should always be aware of why they are taking as well as how to take the medication. Without this knowledge, the patient may be confused about why she is not getting better or how to take the medication properly. Both of these confusing topics can greatly impact the patient’s health.
Overall, the patient was aware of the reasoning for taking most of the medication but plans to speak with her provider regarding the ones she is unaware of. She also is now aware of the potential safety concerns of her medications and plans to monitor the effects of the medications better. I enjoyed writing the medication reconciliation paper. I learned about new medication and had the opportunity to teach the patient and help her advocate for herself.
Module 3 Reflection:
Module 3: Knowledge and Clinical Judgement in ATi explained knowledge as a whole and subcategories such as nursing knowledge and how to apply that to judgements pertaining to the hospital setting. Before this module, I never thought about nursing knowledge and how to apply it to the hospital setting. I found it very interesting how in-depth nursing knowledge is and how much is applied to it. I learned about nursing knowledge focused on numerous things such as legal and ethical issues, as well as nutritional knowledge. These types of knowledge make sense for nurses to need. For example, I learned that it is extremely important to teach your patients about their diet and other nutritional aspects. These ideas relate to what I am learning this semester because, in Adult Health 1, we are learning how to apply the knowledge we have to a hospital setting. We are also learning how to educate the patients properly. This module directly applies to major concepts of Adult Health 1.
My new understanding of nursing knowledge and clinical judgement will influence my integration into the nursing culture because these two concepts are major aspects of the world of nursing. Nurses must have the ability to transfer their knowledge into a judgement that is the best for the patient. I now know I will need the knowledge I have and will obtain these next two years to help make the best decision for patients as well as educate them on the decision. The module also touched on effective communication, which is important in nursing as well. Being able to create trust and therapeutic relationships with patients will create the best environment for them and the nurse. These concepts are all major aspects of nursing that I will carry into my culture of nursing.
Module 4 Reflection:
Module 4: Priority Setting Framework in ATi also has major concepts that pertain to nursing. I knew that as nurses, priorities were extremely important. Nurses must understand which patient they should see first and apply the ABCs of nursing and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to make the best decision for the patient. I did not know before this module about survival potential as well as the different types of risk reduction. I learned that there were different types of risk reduction, and the nurse must use Maslow’s Hierarchy and ABCs to determine the immediate risk. I also learned about the different types of survival potentials and the four different classes. This module directly applies to what we are learning in Adult Health 1 too. We are taught that as nurses we must prioritize our patients. We must use Maslow’s Hierarchy and the ABCs to help the most at need patients and to make the best decision for the patients. We also learned about the additional frameworks such as acute vs. chronic and unstable vs. stable, which the module also focused on.
Similar to Module 3, this program had major concepts of the culture of nursing. My new understanding of these concepts will influence by integration into the world of nursing because I now understand how and why I should prioritize certain things or patients over others. I will be able to use Maslow’s Hierarchy and ABCs to make the best decisions for my patients. Although having to choose to help one patient first over another can be extremely difficult, understanding the concepts that Module 4 emphasized helps better understand the reasoning behind the action. These concepts, along with Module 3, are important details in the world of nursing and I will make sure to incorporate them into my practice.
Collaboration is a huge part of almost every aspect of our lives. We collaborate with coworkers, family members, and friends to create significant work. When I began to look for a painting or sculpture that resonated collaboration to me, I wanted to find something that two people created together. I found these painting and thought that they were very interesting and as I researched a little deeper into the artist, I found that she takes her three-year-old’s paintings and creates a picture out of them. I found it amazing that this collaboration was between a three-year-old and a mother. The truth about collaboration is people are working together to create something amazing, no matter how young or old, they are working and putting their skills together to create a good outcome. Some people could look at the three-year-old’s painting and think nothing of it but by painting an outline around the art, something amazing was created. To me, that is what collaboration is all about, putting two minds together to create something amazing.
Module 1: Testing and Remediation
The Testing and Remediation Module on ATi was focused on preparing students on how to take and learn from exams properly and effectively. This year, the exams are much harder and because of that, the study habits that I adopted throughout my college career thus far are not the most effective anymore. Through this module, I learned new study tactics, such as making an outline and word mapping, that have helped me succeed on my first two exams this year. Since the exams this year are more difficult, my anxiety around test-taking has increased. I learned different methods, in this module, on how to decrease my test anxiety. One of the best ideas from the module was ways to relieve test anxiety and remaining calm when other students begin to finish their exams and leave the classroom. Personally, when other students finish and leave, I tend to get anxious that I am taking too long and will not have enough time to finish. The program coupled remaining calm with other ways to relieve the anxiety, such as taking deep breaths or obtaining earplugs. Through these examples, I have ways to keep my stress centered around test-taking low.
This program also focused heavily on ideas that relate to the concepts I am learning in my nursing classes this year as well as the most efficient way to take exams. One concept that many of the classes this year focus on is preparing the students for the NCLEX. The Testing and Remediation Module had many categories on ways to prepare for and succeed on the NCLEX that can also be used on exams this year. This relates to what we are learning this year because many of our professors are also preparing for exams and the NCLEX. The program had categories on critically thinking and finding the best answers through the ABCs of nursing and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. These ideas are the focus of succeeding in nursing classes. By eliminating “minus sign answers” (incorrect) and relating the question to the ABCs and Maslow’s Hierarchy, the answer can be found. This way of learning and test-taking is how our professors have taught us to think critically.
Many of the concepts I learn in class and this program relate to the profession of nursing. The most important thing as nurses is caring for the patient. The module focused on “Using Priority Setting Frameworks” to help succeed on exams but, prioritizing is always important in every realm of nursing. Nurses must prioritize the most effective and reasonable way to care for a patient. The ABCs of nursing and Maslow’s Hierarchy are two of the most important ways to prioritize what to do for a patient. Through this program, I was able to learn how to set up priority frameworks that I will be able to integrate into my practice as a nurse to provide the best care for my patients.
Module 2: Nursing Concepts
The Nursing Concepts Module on ATi focused on the general practices of nursing and how to provide quality care. Through these practices, patient care is holistic and complete. This module taught me important aspects of these general practices and ways to follow them. Through my nursing class, I knew the patient was the center of everything we do as nurses and their needs came before anything else. However, I learned different ways to achieve and prioritize those needs. One of the ideas that was very important was making sure the care was that was being provided started at least restricted and then if needed, when to more restricted. Relating this idea of least to most restrictive to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs makes sense. It did not occur to me how much prioritizing went into patient care. Through this program, I learned how to prioritize for a client and work interdisciplinary to achieve the best care for the patient.
The module relates to what I am learning this semester in my nursing classes because I am learning ways to properly care for and be an advocate for the patients. In my nursing classes, the ideas we learn about are incorporated into the fundamentals of nursing such as quality and safe care for clients and the nursing process. The categories in the Nursing Concept Module focused on these concepts of the fundamentals of nursing as well. We are also learning ways to be effective leaders for the client in the interdisciplinary world, which is greatly related to the categorizes in the module. This module helped me better understand the reasoning behind the ideas I am learning in class and why nurses prioritize certain things over others.
My new understanding of the concepts I learned about in this module will help me integrate myself into the profession of nursing because I learned the reasoning behind why nurses do what they do and advocate for the patients. I will be prepared to speak up for my client’s needs to my fellow medical leaders and help make the best decision for them. I will also integrate the ideas of prioritizing based on the ABCs, Maslow’s Hierarchy, and least to most restrictive into my care. My patients will always be the center of my care and I will try to do everything based on what is the best decision for them.
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