Clinical Research question

The key to this assignment is to do something that shows you understand and are capable of the process - not to solve world hunger. Make sure you pick a topic with plenty of research behind it. Pretty much any of the major research clearing-house (Nursing Consult, EBSCO's PERC, MD Consult, etc.) will have articles ranked by levels of evidence. Just about every hospital subscribes to one of these sites. If you don't have access to one, see if the hospital where you do clinicals will let you access theirs.

Then, pick a topic that you are familiar with but want to know more about. Avoid 'cutting edge' stuff that doesn't have a lot of literature yet. In the case of pressure sores, you would want to look at treatment options, not assessment techniques - there is a lot of literature. Another great topic is small bore NG tube placement. Anything related to current 'core measures' is also good -- tons of literature. This includes catheter-related infections, prevention of pneumonia among ventilator-assisted patients. . .

I did my senior research project on therapeutic hypothermia for patients after cardiac arrest. As in, is it an effective treatment option in preventing neurological damage or decrease the mortality??
There was a lot out there on it.

Another one i did was patients on ventilators, getting them up and walking to prevent pneumonia.

You can do something on NCLEX. Such as passing rates when students take an NCLEX preparation course vs not taking an NCLEX preparation course.

Lots out there, just find something that interests you, or something you have seen in clinicals.
If you like pressure sores and wounds, you could do something like the use of Honey in treatment of sores.

maggot therapy

We had to do one every semester in my program for clinicals. I did one on pressure ulcer prevention once. I actually found a quatitative article on preventative measures. It was evaluating the effectiveness of the Braden scale. Search for it on medline. Does your school have a subscription to any medical databases like this? Check with the library and they might have a free subscrition for you to use. That's how I did all of my research. I did another EBP paper on alternative pain management and it was an article on the use of pet therapy in pediatric patients. I've seen other papers on pain management in burn patients too....it was a pretty net article they used.

I researched workplace work-arounds...I know it sounds vague. However, most of the hospitals in my area utilized barcode scanning systems to administer all of their medications and I was interested in finding out how creative the nurses were in bypassing the "rules" in order to administer the medications. For example: did the nurses scan every single barcode label of EVERY med? Did the nurses drag the laptop with cart into each patient's room every single time they afministered a med? I interviewed the hospital's primary nursing informatics specialist who was able to share with me tons of statistics and data. I also found lots of data through Cinahl, Ebsco, etc.

You Guys are all brilliant!! Thank you so much! I will post another thread about review of literature which I need help with again. To be honest I suck at writing paper & I am so lost when it comes to it. So any help I would really appreciate it. I am on my first year in nursing and it is no where close to taking regular classes in a community college.

This sounds interesting!


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