Just a little healthcare humor

Mod 3 - I forgot to mention

I really like the National Clearinghouse site. My search there resulted in an evidence based practice guideline for preventing DVT in multiple types of patients as well as research articles comparing lovenox, unfractionated heparing and sequential compression devices. It's a great resource I've bookmarked and will keep using.

Mod 3 - change might be my friend but I'm not sure yet

Searching for articles has always been daunting to me. When I’ve searched for articles during my first 2 semesters I had no guidance about how to search. Well, except for Jean LeBer’s 2 day tutorial when I and all my distance cohorts got together on campus to experience the feeling of drowning in information together.

I searched CINAHL, and www.searchmedica.com, and Johns Hopkins University through EndNote. I’ve used CINAHL often and though it lead to 3225 results before I set limits and 31 with limit I decided to use PubMed. I had only searched it through EndNote prior to this assignment. Do you hate moving outside your comfort zone as much as I do?

I can’t imagine the costs to subscribe to all the different sites if we didn’t have the universities VPN access. That thought makes me worry about access to all this information after I graduate.

PubMed had over 200 articles linked to my search for best practices for preventing DVT in trauma patients. With limits I had 22 articles to read. I did not limit the age of the research and after reviewing the results I only had 11 articles published in the last 5 years. PubMed was easy to use, but saving my search was an adventure. I discovered I had to create an NCBI account in order to save the search. I think I prefer CINAHL and searching through EBSCOhost for ease of saving searches and exporting to EndNote.

Johns Hopkins University through EndNote only had 1 article and searchmedica.com was not organized well. My search through searchmedica resulted in thousands of articles that had no relevance to my query. I will investigate it further to see if I can learn how to more effectively use it because there was a tremendous amount of information and I could sort it according to catagories like “evidence-based articles,” “practice guidelines,” and “patient education”.

MeSH terms are still a scary thing but now that I'm sailing outside my comfort zone I will dive into using them as well.

Module 2 information system

At my previous hospital, DRMC in St. George, the nurses on our floor decided to get involved in improving the system we used for charting. We discussed, in several small groups, how to improve our charting by changing and adding to the sections that automatically "popped up" in our patient assessment charting. Patient Education/Teaching was being done but not being charted. We asked for this section to be a required area every day. In order to improve our flu and pneumonia vaccination numbers we asked that vaccinations be a required area of charting. At the moment I am looking into what can be done to improve the time between the dictation of physician progress notes and their transcription to HELP 2, the EHR we use.

Module 1, #1

Hello everyone,
I started the distance ANP program in January this year, and so far it's been great, stressful, but great. I live in Cedar City, Utah with my husband and 4 of our children.
I've been an RN for 7 years. I spent 5 years on the Medical/Oncology floor at DRMC in St. George, 2 years as a hospice nurse and the last year as a house supervisor at our hospital here.
I've worked in healthcare since 1987. IT has come a long way since my first days as an MA in a physician's office. The Med/Onc floor I worked on until last year started computer charting in 2006 and added medication scanning in 2007. The program we use is a DOS based system that I am hoping gets upgraded to the 21st century soon.

The beginning

I am very new to this idea. I created a blog once before, but haven't used it since I made it because I couldn't find it. When I followed the "blogging cheat sheet" and signed into google - there it was! I'm going to have to be careful about posting in the correct blog because the other one is for political opinions and debates.
This could end up being a great networking tool.