Nursing 6004 Module 4 Blog Entry

I think that a big part of the nursing profession is teaching. Almost all nurses provide teaching as part of their job. As a psychiatric nurse, I do teaching all the time with patients. This could be teaching regarding the medications that have been prescribed to them, teaching about their diagnosis, teaching about diet and exercise and teaching about stress management. We also do teaching on medical issues such as diabetic teaching and various other disease management. We also do teaching in the way of groups that are run at the state hospital where I work. Nurses run several of the groups. These groups can be things such as skills training, wellness groups, smoking cessation groups or psychoeducational groups. While usually the clinicians run the therapy groups, the nurses are sometimes asked to fill-in this role also. While it is not officially "teaching" the nurses are also the front-line staff that are around when we have patients that are escalating or needing to talk to a staff when they are having a hard time. It is often the nursing staff that sit and problem-solve with patients and help them to use their coping skills that they are learning in their therapy groups. I think this is also an important "teaching" role in that we provide support and care for patients by role-modeling good coping and appropriate interactions with others. I do not think that there is a health care professional role that does not involve teaching in some aspect. Just the nature of being a healthcare professional means being around the patients and be helping them when they are sick or needing assistance in some way.  There are endless teaching moments that happen day to day, even if they are small ones. 

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Nursing 6004 Module 3 Blog Entry

In this module, I was searching for information on the pharmacological treatment of depression. I used the CINAHL database, Google search engine, and also looked at the National Guideline Clearinghouse website to investigate this topic. I found a plethora of information between the three. By far, Google turned up the most information, with thousands upon thousands of websites coming up. I found Google very easy to use, and was able to narrow down the search by putting in more specific keywords when searching. Although there were a lot of results that came up, many of them were not evidence-based sites and were based on people's personal experiences with depression. While that is interesting, I did not find it as helpful for what I was searching for. However, I think Google can be a good tool when searching general topics to get an overview.

I also found some relevant information on the national guidelines clearinghouse website. I was not familiar with this website, and did have to search around for a while to find what I was looking for. I was looking for specific information on what type of antidepressant medication would be most helpful for a new diagnosis of depression, and while this website did have information on the treatment of depression, it did not give me specific information regarding what medications to choose first. I did bookmark this website though and will keep it mind to use in the future.

Finally, I used the CINAHL database through the university library homepage. I found the CINAHL database to be easy to use and liked that I could put specifiers on the search, to only bring up peer reviewed articles. I also had many results with CINAHL, with some results being more applicable than others. It did bring up specific articles on antidepressant medications. I think that CINAHL would be my choice out of the three when looking for evidence based information. The Cochrane Library would also have been a good choice, although I tried not to use this one, since I am familiar with it. Overall, this module was a good reminder of all the different places that we can look for information and how technology and databases can help us to find information on evidence-based practice.