What is the expected outcome, or how will this positively impact the patient or their family?

Review the clinical stories in the beginning of chapters 17 and 21 of the ebook Introduction to Evidence-Based Practice: A Practical Guide for Nursing from this module’s readings. Choose one of the clinical stories and write a 200–250-word initial post answering the following discussion prompts
. Story from chapter 17
Sara has worked on an adult medical-surgical unit for 2 years. The patient population is a mixture of elderly, chronically ill patients with a variety of acute medical illnesses and general adult surgical patients. She is caring for LH, a 78-year-old female who is 5 days post-thoracotomy for lung cancer. LH was transferred from the intensive care unit to the Sara’s unit 2 days ago. When helping LH to bathe, Sara noticed several areas of skin breakdown on her back and sacrum. The wounds on the skin covering her spine look as if a single layer of skin has been torn off, but the wound on her sacrum looks different. Sara observes that it is a shallow, full-thickness crater with a red to pink bed. Although LH walks about 15 feet twice per day and sits in a chair for 15 minutes after her walk, she spends the rest of the day in a standard hospital bed, requiring help to turn. She is still quite weak from her surgery and complicated early recovery and requires oral pain medication every 4 hours. She is consuming only clear liquids, tolerates them poorly, and has a distended abdomen. Sara wonders if there was something else that she and her fellow nurses could have done to prevent the breaks in LH’s skin integrity.
Story from chapter 21
Susan, an advanced practice nurse in a congestive heart failure (CHF) clinic is reviewing medication lists with patients after discharge from the hospital. She finds that many of the elderly patients are asking questions about what medications they should be currently taking and how to take their medications. Although patients tell her they received a written medication instruction sheet at discharge, they are having trouble reading and understanding the information.
After compiling the feedback from several visits, Susan presents her findings to the nurse manager of the telemetry unit. The unit manager brings Susan’s concerns to the unit shared governance meeting for the staff’s feedback. Ainsley, one of the more experienced nurses, voices a concern about the way the information on the medication instruction sheets is formatted and written. The standard hospital medication information sheets are formatted using single spacing and small fonts. In addition, the instruction sheets use generic terms for the medications and include complicated medical terminology. Sentences are long, and many of the terms are multisyllabic. The shared governance committee questions whether elderly patients are able to read and understand the information. Because taking the correct dose of medications on the right schedule is important, the manager asks Kristin, the unit’s representative to the hospital’s evidence-based practice committee, to take this problem to the next committee meeting. By doing so, the committee members can review the scope and scale of the problem and explore current evidence related to the readability of instruction material written for elderly patients.
DISCUSSION PROMPTS
Identify at least one additional problem this patient might experience. Provide a brief overview of the problem and how it will negatively impact the patient or their family.
Research EBP guidelines available to address the problem. Provide a summary of at least one guideline that you found. What is the expected outcome, or how will this positively impact the patient or their family?
 

Last Completed Projects