Module 6- What have I learned??

I hate to admit it but I learned a lot about what is actually plagiarism and what we need to do to avoid using it in our writing. I had a professor in a previous class who helped me to see that rearranging the original words of another’s work even if we cited the source correctly was still plagiarism. I felt that If I didn’t use their exact words and cited the source I was ok. I have learned that this is not ok. Since this professor told me what I was doing was wrong, even though I didn’t truly understand why I have worked hard at expressing myself in my own words and not just paraphrasing someone else’s work. It has been hard because I have done things this way for years and never been told I was doing it incorrectly. After this module including the podcast on plagiarism and the article I understand better why it was plagiarism. For me if I understand why something is the way it is I can be more supportive of it and I feel more invested to do it correctly. I am thankful for this module, I feel better prepared to write my professional theses is a few months and I feel confident that I will do it correctly.

Module 5 blog--clinical decision making

How did the readings influence your perception of your own clinical decision-making?
The readings made me think a lot about how I make decisions. In the NICU we have a system called CPG- clinical support guidelines. Each month we were supposed to review new entries to the system and be aware of the information provided there. It probably took over a year for me to realize that this was a valuable tool. Occasionally we are asked to do procedures that we don’t do often, and thus we forget the exact procedure to follow to do it correctly. One such task is administering blood products. If we have not done it in a while we may be unsure how often and for how long we need to do frequent vital signs. By utilizing the CPG it can give us the information we need in a reliable way. This became clear to me one day as I set up to administer a blood transfusion to one of my patients. There had been some changes in the vital sign recording requirements in the past few months and I wasn’t quite sure what the changes had ended up being. I asked a few of my colleagues and everyone gave me a slightly different answer. They differed on how many at 15 minute intervals versus how many at 30 minute intervals. Finally one colleague said hey let’s look it up on CPG—what a novel idea! We looked it up and got the correct information which I shared with my coworkers and then administered the blood and correctly recorded the vital signs at the correct intervals. After this incident I frequently consulted CPG even when I was really sure about the correct procedure to do a task. If there is one thing that I have found it is things are always changing in health care and it never hurts to double check. Especially when you are working with premature babies and the cost of an error could mean a life.

Module four response

Teaching that is done in my professional role is in the form of psychoeducation. I do a lot of psychoeducation with my clients. By understanding the different kinds of learning styles I can taylor my approach to them in such a way that I can more effectively teach them what they need to know. I do have one client that is aware that she is a kinesthetic learner and I often take her for walks while we do therapy. She opens up so much more when we walk and talk. She also does well with art therapy, or playing with play-doh while we talk. Knowing how they learn and how they think is helpful to customize our teaching for our clients.  

All nursing/health providers have a responsibility to teach those we care for. A large part of nursing is teaching. No matter what we do as nurses or nurse practitioners we will need to be able to do some sort of education to our clients. It may be in the form of psychoeducation, nutritional education, education about healthy lifestyles, or education concerning disease processes.