Nursing Research Class

    The role of the professional nurse in promotion of evidenced based practice is one that has grown in need recently.  Nursing was involved in past research more in the role of executing protocols for doctors.  As nursing has grown as a profession, then there were those "academic" nurses with PhD's that were involved in research, but never the bedside nurse.  Those at the bedside are now being called to participate fully in research by their hospitals.  No longer simply just a participant, but an active developer of research questions and implementation.  These nurses now are authors of evidenced based research articles and studies published widely, and not just in nursing journals.
     Nurses that have knowledge of the ethical and professional issues involved in gathering data, enrolling subjects, and protecting their legal, ethical and moral rights is of the utmost importance if approval is to be granted to our questions.  Dr. Ellis, of Santa Fe College, stated in our poster presentation something to this effect-Nurses have so many wonderful questions and ideas and harbor much knowledge in their particular areas of expertise.  But she went on to say that if we, as nurses, don't harness this knowledge and move it forward in a meaningful way, and share it, then it is lost.   Nursing research has been the one class that I can say has helped me grow the most.
     Previous courses have honed my writing skills, ability to use multi-media such as Power Point, Excel and organizing group projects by sharing information electronically.  This course, however, has taken all of those skills and gone a step further.  APA formatting had to be perfect, posters were created, and content was edited by group comments.  But it was the content gathering that felt more advanced, more professional and the criteria for choosing content truly had to be evidenced based.  

    The article critique summary is what I feel helped me the most.  It's a tool that I'll definitely use in my career from this point forward.  I feel that in previous class papers and discussion posts, finding interesting peer reviewed articles was simple.  In this class, paring down articles that not only addressed the subject matter but also answered a research question proved to be difficult.  On top of that, needing 10 articles didn't seem that onerous until the critique summary had to be applied.  I found that a handful of my articles had to be thrown out and my search then had to continue.  

     My research question concerned my area of interest: burns.  I wanted to find out how pruritis, a major complaint of healing burn wounds, could be reduced.  Because the standard was set so high for us in this class, I am quite confident that my research question is sound enough to actually go forward with a real study.  I'm quite excited about it.  

     In the meantime, in my own work, I continue to grow as a clinical leader with just one year of experience as of November 11th.  The last course helped me to grow from the management/people skills aspects of the job, and this course has helped me to feel more legitimate in the nursing research requirements of the job.  Not only have I learned the research "lingo" but actually know how to get started with almost any question and follow it through into a meaningful and executable study.