During my immersion hours I learned of the population health concern for the facility in the
ED. Th emergency department is really struggling to care for the percentage of the population that
are opioid abusers as well as homeless. This national epidemic is really getting out of hand and
being the main source of medical attention, the ED is really dealing with the epidemic. It leads to
an especially difficult safe discharge process. If the patient is homeless they may struggle to pick
up prescription or increased risk for infections post discharge. Often times the patient does not
reveal this right away or ever, listing someone else’s address or not sharing their living situation
until discharge time. According to the article
Prevalence of Homelessness in the Emergency
Department Setting,
the homeless population make up a large portion of ED visits, found to make
up 10%, and suffer from more complex health conditions leading to longer hospital stays than the
average (2017). The issue of opioid seeking and abuse is making it difficult for nurses and doctors
to differentiate between pain crisis’ and ‘drug seekers’. It is often hard to correctly identify if you
should send them home with a prescription or order a social work consult.
I am gaining confidence in my role for this course and am looking forward to continuing my
research on reducing stroke readmission rates. I am also looking forward to my future immersion
hours and continuously expanding my knowledge.
Feldman, B. J., Calogero, C. G., Elsayed, K. S., Abbasi, O. Z., Enyart, J., Friel, T. J., … Greenberg,
M. R. (2017). Prevalence of Homelessness in the Emergency Department Setting.
Western
Journal of Emergency Medicine
,
18
(3), 366–372.
WEEK 3
In the third week of class, we are diving into the real references that we will be using to
support our project. We are also presenting our PICOT statement, which is the format we are using
to summarize our research question in a that explores every aspect. This consists of stating the
population, intervention, outcome you will be measuring, and the time (duration) of your study
2
(Riva, 2012). I am glad that this concept was addressed in the previous research class, allowing
me to be familiar with the format. The previous class also helped me with the assignment this
week, as I had already found and evaluated some of the scientific journals I will be using. I think it
is very useful to have an intro class before, it really helped me feel less unprepared and
overwhelmed this week.
This week I have become more comfortable with researching and evaluating each articles
relevance and validity to my project. I also feel l am improving with APA format with practice. Being
able to evaluate EBP is so important in nursing and needs to be done before knowing if you should
implement it in your practice. This week I determined that the approach that will be useful to
evaluate evidence during my research and in the future is the Rapid Critical Appraisal (RCA). This
