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Diploma of Nursing - Research and Apply Evidence to Practice

Assessment - Research Project

Introduction
Within your scope of practice as an Enrolled Nurse, you are required to apply critical-thinking skills and nursing rationale related to an individual patient's specific nursing care requirements. To be able to do so, you need to develop evidence-based practice skills, which involves establishing what information you need, gathering information and critically analysing the information gathered in relation to your patient and practice.

Summary
You will be required to research a clinical issue based on one (1) of the scenarios provided. You will plan and conduct a literature review, appraise the selected literature, and summarise the main findings derived from the literature. You will have two (2) attempts to complete the Research project for CHCPOL003, Assessment 1B. Please refer to your learning resources to ascertain and acquire the knowledge that you will require to successfully complete this assessment task.
Please refer to the Task Instructions section below for details on how to complete this assessment task.

Task Instructions
For Assessment 1B, Research project, you will be required to download the document, choose one (1) of the scenarios provided and complete all five (5) sections; for your chosen scenario, then upload your answers to Blackboard. All questions must be attempted. When responding to the questions, you should pay attention to the entire question being asked and provide a reference when required.

Section 1: Scenario choice and "problem" statement Section 2: Preparatory steps for the data search Section 3: Search strategy and data collection Section 4: Analysis of the information

Section 5: Summary of recommendations
You are required to complete a literature search and review to explore issues relevant to your scenario and provide recommendations based on your findings.

Research reports require evidence to be clearly structured and presented under specific headings. For each section, a number of items must be addressed. Responses to these should be made under the headings provided.

Emma, an EN student nurse, is on a placement at a GEMU (Geriatric Evaluation Medical Unit). She is assigned to look after Mary Jones, a 92 yr. female patient. Mary presented with mild confusion and a background of dementia. Emma recalled the discussion by clinicians that Mary may have mixed conditions of dementia, depression, and acute delirium (The 3Ds). Explore the issues with ‘The 3 Ds' and how to discern between the three conditions in an acute setting to provide the optimal care to Mrs. Jones.
Bella, an EN student nurse, is on a placement in a busy orthopaedic unit in a large metropolitan hospital. She witnessed the MET call response activation for a male patient who has recently been admitted to the ward post R) total knee replacement (TKR). Explore the issues of recognition of and response to clinical deterioration in acute care settings. Identify the role of the nursing student in the recognition of and response to clinical deterioration processes.
During an acute placement on the surgical ward, John, an EN student nurse, noticed that the nursing staff were mostly using the numerical scale (0-10) when they conducted the pain assessment. He recalled other pain assessment tools, PQRST and modified Abbey scale, that he had learnt at university. Explore the advantages of alternative pain assessment tools presented in the literature regarding this topic. You may choose to compare the traditional (numerical 0-10) pain scale assessment to alternative assessment tools.
Pratima, an EN student nurse, participated in an education session conducted by the pharmacist on the ward. The pharmacist discussed the efficacy of Apixaban in further prevention of stroke. The pharmacist mentioned Warfarin and indicated that Apixaban is a safer option. Pratima became curious and wanted to gather more information regarding the therapeutic differences of the medications. You may choose to compare Warfarin and Apixaban side effects and decide which option is safer in the context of stroke prevention.
Monitoring fluids input and output is clinically significant to establish the patient's baseline and to identify issues with hyper/hypovolaemia. During his clinical placement, Sharif, an EN student nurse found many inconsistencies with the Fluid Balance Chart documentation and intended to explore the issues surrounding fluid balance charts recording practices in the literature.

Research Tips

Think about issues that are important to you within your field and how tackling them could potentially help improve professional practice approaches or patient experience. The research statement presents the purpose of the research in light of a clear and focused topic.

Find out what has been written about your topic of interest. A good starting point is the list of references or bibliography of a recent article or book on the topic. Then, use other bibliographical sources, including abstracts, electronic databases and the Internet to conduct searches.
Suitable databases include: PubMed, Embase, Medline Complete, Cochrane Library, Scopus, Web of Science, Ebsco Host, ProQuest Central, ProQuest Public, MeSH, or other peer-reviewed databases/journals. Most of these can be accessed through the TUA library website.

In searching and retrieving the appropriate literature, the search strategy is important. Search strategies include use of appropriate search terms and synonyms and assessing the results of this initial search. It is important to have pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. For example:
Population (nurses, doctor, allied health professionals).
Setting (hospitals, residential care facilities).
Publication period - sources should be as current as possible so define your search by using dates. For example, from 2010 or 2014 onwards, or similar. For this assignment, use the limiter setting of searching from 5 years ago to now.
Language - sources should be in English.

If you decide that a text is relevant, write down the bibliographical details in full; as the item would appear in your list of references.

For each topic, focus on between 3-5 key sources to start. You may choose to include or discard these sources depending on their quality, specificity and applicability to your topic.

Find the literature. First check whether the material is held at Laureate Library, or you might be able to use inter library loans.
Read the literature. Record the author and the title and take notes. Your aim is to determine how the topic is approached and what is said about it. As you make notes, ask yourself the following questions about each text:
What sort of evidence is it?
What are the aims or hypotheses?
What is the methodology?
Does the methodology suit the aims?
How reliable or valid is it?
What are the outcomes?