Category: Collaboration

Trauma-Informed Care

October 6, 2021 / ecarrell

Trauma exposure impacts everyone in myriad ways, impacting the mind, body, spirit and surroundings. I think the way that trauma impacts us involves the kind of trauma we experience. For example, trauma can be psychological, such as a threat of death or injury, which may result in feelings of fear, helplessness or lack of hope. Additionally, the trauma could cause such stress that it impacts physical wellbeing, resulting in head or stomach aches. This stress could further impact a person’s spirit, resulting in grief, disengagement or disconnection. A person may socially isolate themselves, changing their environment, or even displace themselves geographically to create distance between themselves and the trauma.

Adverse childhood experiences have been proven to impact us further down the road, even in adulthood. Not only do traumatic childhood experiences impact us psychologically, overtime, the stress can increase risk of heart problems, diabetes mellitus type 2, obesity, depression or anxiety, and poor life choices such as substance abuse and smoking. Over time, ACES can also result in bad grades, more time off of work, and even early death.

As a future healthcare provider, it is vital that I have a strong understanding of how trauma impacts us throughout the life span. That includes the ability to apply the Trauma-Informed Care principles to my practice. This includes safety, trustworthiness, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural/historical/gender issues. In other words, I must be able to keep my patients’ individual needs and background in mind during the care process, while also acting as a source of support and guidance. Healing from trauma is a team effort and requires other care team members to collaborate in order to provide support, empowerment, and a sense of safety to the client. All in all, everyone experiences and deals with trauma differently, and therefore may need different methods of treatment in order to regain peace.

Pre-Interview Reflection

September 23, 2021 / ecarrell

The health professional I have chosen was a clinical instructor of mine in a previous semester. I chose to write about her because she demonstrated a strong dedication to her practice, a vast wealth of knowledge, and a commitment to learning from her patients and her peers. I could tell that all staff on the unit, regardless of status or rank, were drawn to her and felt comfortable around her. I know that she worked on the unit for several years as a CNA before becoming a nurse, which strengthened her relationship with the staff and helped her to establish herself as a member of the care team.

The difference between formal and informal leadership is the presence of official authority. Formal leadership comes from structure and authority, and it is usually methodically appointed. On the other hand, informal leadership may not have the traits of an official role and may just be a known status that a person has grown into. Often, informal leadership is more of a position of influence rather than a different title. The nurse I chose to write about is more of an informal leader, as she is still very young and relatively new to her nursing role. She has not been formally appointed as a leader on the unit itself, however, I think her status as a clinical educator speaks volumes about her influence in the hospital, as she is clearly a trusted source of knowledge.

I am most interested in learning about how this nurse feels she is supported on the unit, and how she may be able to turn her informal leadership into formal leadership over time. I am curious to find out more about conflicts and ethical dilemmas she has faced, and how her informal leadership role has helped her to handle certain situations.

EBP Final Reflection

August 1, 2021 / ecarrell

Evan Carrell

EBP Final Reflection

August 1, 2021

This project was valuable in many ways. Working in a team is always a challenge, as combining multiple writing styles and preferences into one paper requires adjustments. In my future nursing practice, I will inevitably encounter situations where I will need to collaborate with colleagues who I disagree or clash with. Additionally, this foundational experience allowed me to practice finding appropriate research articles that fit well with the group’s PICOT question. The ability to find evidence to back up a research question will certainly be something I’m faced with in the clinical setting. In order to successfully write this paper, I had to pull outcomes from multiple different clinical trials and evaluate them based on their relevance, variables and reproducibility. Being able to pick out the strengths and weaknesses of a clinical trial is a very valuable skill to have, as doing so is vital in the process of eliminating redundancy, while increasing search efficiency.

In the instance of the research into our topic specifically, I learned a lot about the benefits of music therapy. None of the studies we found cited any observable disadvantages or adverse effects associated with this intervention. The results from these studies showed me the benefits of implementing music therapy hospital wide. I can say for certain that in my future practice, I will utilize music therapy in the treatment of my patients.

As far as my individual team contribution, I learned that I work best with structure, and laying out a clear outline of what my work will look like helps me organize my thoughts. Luckily, my teammates operate similarly, and our work came together fairly smoothly

EBP Appraisal and Synthesis

July 25, 2021 / ecarrell

July 25, 2021

After researching our chosen topic (the use of music therapy in mechanically ventilated patients) it became clear to us that this technique, while maybe not widely implemented, is effective and useful in the clinical setting. From the start, just based on a quick overview of our articles, we knew that music therapy was understood to be helpful in creating a healing environment. However, I didn’t realize the extent to which it was useful in shortening hospital stays, preventing agitation, and decreasing the number of days on a ventilator. Additionally, our articles pointed out that music therapy as a treatment is cost-effective, requires minimal resources, and does not require additional training for staff.

That being said, I can confidently say that I will implement music therapy into my future nursing practice. At no point in any of our articles were any adverse effects listed, which is a promising finding. Considering that it does no additional harm, and actually reduces anxiety for patients at no additional cost, I would use it for as many patients as possible.

I think the only point of disagreement my groupmates and I had about the findings was how we might tweak our PICOT question. Some of the research articles we found talked about ICU patients specifically, others talked about conscious versus unconscious patients, and we went back and forth for a bit about how specific our patient population should be.

During the writing process, the only challenge we faced as a group was blending our writing styles in our paper, which worked out nicely once we revised the paper as a group.

From Inquiry Through Discovery

June 13, 2021 / ecarrell

After coming up with our original PICOT question, and finding reliable resources, my group was able to narrow down our topic a bit more. Originally, our question was “What is the relationship between music and patient outcomes in the ICU?”, which was a good start, but it was still a bit vague. Researching the original question helped us to more narrowly define “patient outcomes” and we decided to focus on anxiety levels in ventilated patients. Our revised question is “What is the relationship between music and anxiety levels in critically ill ventilated patients in the ICU?” This was a difficult process, as our searches came up with multiple potential outcome topics. However, it seemed like the majority of the primary resources we found discussed playing music for ventilated ICU patients and monitoring more self-reported measures like pain and anxiety. We were quickly able to agree on this change, given the number of pertinent journal articles we found. I think what was helpful for our process as a group was our collective ability to connect to this subject, and share personal stories relating to our question. We are all very devoted to and excited about our chosen topic!

Planning the Journey

May 28, 2021 / ecarrell

I anticipate this group project going smoothly. I have worked with my teammates during group work before, and I know that we all trust each other’s ability to do good work. Our communication plan so far is to talk over text, email and zoom to work out details and assign tasks. We will set deadlines for ourselves and hold each other accountable for the work we agree to do. In the case of a conflict, we will have honest conversations and reorganize, reassigning tasks and making edits as needed. Respectful, timely communication is key to successful group projects. I don’t foresee many barriers to completing this project, however, everyone tends to do work and write papers a little bit differently, so that is good to keep in mind preemptively. We each have different levels of clinical experience as well, and that is an important factor as we prepare to write a paper involving hospital policies and different interventions in the care process. This same idea will be useful in future nursing practice, as every individual brings a completely different set of experiences to the table, which can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage at times.