Patient Care Problems
Instructions
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 2 pages initial post answering the following discussion prompts.
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.
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?
