Consider your experience and learning with regard to EHRs. If you were to design a learning program for your clinical environment centered on the use of EHRs, what would it include? How would it be taught?
2. Obtaining data in clinical practice:
Suggest a data mining project for your practice. Which information would you like to have about your practice area that could be extracted using data mining strategies? How can you make sure that you select and develop those that best fit your data?
3. Translating data/research into practice:
Twelve-hour shifts are problematic for patient and nurse safety, yet hospitals continue to keep the 12-hour shift schedule. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine (Board on Health Care Services & Institute of Medicine, 2004) published a report that referred to studies as early as 1988 that discussed the negative effects of rotating shifts on intervention accuracy. Workers with 12-hour shifts experienced more fatigue than workers on 8-hour shifts. In another study done in Turkey by Ilhan, Durukan, Aras, Turkcuoglu, and Aygun (2006), factors relating to increased risk for injury were age of 24 years or younger, less than 4 years of nursing experience, working in surgical intensive care units, and working for more than 8 hours.
As a clinician reading these studies, what would your next step be? Is there additional data that you need? If so, how would you obtain this data? Assuming you were part of a management team of a hospital that works 12-hour shifts, what recommendations would you give to the management team and why?
THINK about and work through the questions above, and then use the textbook and online resources to compose your response to each question individually. Remember to provide citations to acknowledge the sources of the information. Make sure you give rationale (scientific evidence and/or your clinical observation) that supports your conclusion.
