A little lost...

VM85 · Mar 2, 2009

making everything paperless would be beneficial as a nurse- many hospitals and facilities have switched over to computerized documenting- its beneficial because there are standards in what is documented- there are cateorgories and questions that are pre-programed.It saves money in costs, provides great documantation that would stand up in court(since there is preprogrammed questions that you just fill in and add any details to)oh and its time saving!

some other possible things to branch out on:the new needleless IV's(to prevent sticks)...the new "minute clinics"(like the ones at cvs) are also a new idea....dont know if this helped any...hope it did and good luck!

Daytonite, BSN, RN · Mar 2, 2009

new issues come up in nursing and the healthcare industry all the time. the issue of going paperless was only an example and was not meant as the subject for you to pursue.

let me tell you about my 30+ years as a nurse. when i was a student back in the early 1970s people were admitted to the hospital with stomach ulcer problems all the time. the doctors ordered something called a sippy diet for them: an alteration of maalox one hour and milk the next. it soothed the irritated stomach. that just doesn't get ordered anymore. why? because of new developments. shortly after i graduated a drug called cimetadine (tagamet) which many know about and is now an over-the-counter medication was approved by the fda. it changed the treatment of ulcers. at the time it was a huge breakthrough. but that wasn't all. some years later a very courageous, or some say stupid, physician experimented with and discovered that there was a bacterial culprit behind 90% of gastric ulcers called h. pylori. this was all new information not known back in 1970 and it revolutionized the treatment of gastric and duodenal ulcers.

those kinds of "new" discoveries/treatments/issues are what your instructor is asking you to write about. polio crippled children when i was a kid; today you rarely hear about it because there is a vaccine to prevent it. when aids was discovered in the 80s people with it were treated like lepers and i remember that some nurses refused to even go near these patients. we had only one drug to treat it. today the treatment for aids is so advanced that many patients live much longer lives with it. look at what is in the healthcare news. when i went back to school several years ago i took a class where we had to do a similar paper of 5 pages. i looked at what was going on in the different state legislatures. it isn't hard to do since all the states have websites that publish what bills they have before them currently. healthcare groups (the american nurses association, american medical association, american hospital association) are right up there with the lobbyists sponsoring bills. i found several states as well as the u.s. congress trying to pass legislation on addressing back injuries in nurses with 2 states actually passing laws already mandating lifting laws. here in my state of california staffing ratios was made a law several years ago and several other states have been trying to do the same. staffing is a big issue in many places. nurses quit jobs because they feel overworked and are practicing unsafely when they have to care for too many patients at a time. and look at this recent controversy with health care insurance coverage, who has it and who doesn't; who can pay for services and who can't. and what is going to happen when all us baby boomers hit the doors of healthcare looking for service if there aren't enough nurses, doctors or facilities to provide what we will need? what plans are being made for us?

you can go onto any of the major news websites and pull up healthcare news or look in any nursing journals to see what new gizmos and drugs have come on the market.