While doing my preceptorship at Brighton First Care, I encountered a patient that made me think about community and public health nursing. This young woman was non-English speaking and was alone. This created a barrier of communication between the patient and health professionals. I grabbed the iPad interpreter to assist with communication with the patient. As I was speaking to her, the provider came into the room and took over with her. She had come into the urgent care because she woke up and her tongue was black. This must have been a scary time for her, and she was obviously concerned. The provider just told her that it may have been caused by one of the medications she was taking. When I watched the encounter, I was a little bit upset. The provider gave her no reassurance that her concern was valid, and she would be okay. He just told her it might be from the medication and walked away. In that moment I wanted to go up to her and give her that reassurance that I felt she needed, but the interpreter was already taken away. Looking back, I regret not doing that for her. Seeing the young, seemingly healthy, woman there with a big Ziplock bag filled with many prescription medications, I wondered if this is not the first time this has happened to her. As a nurse, it is important to be an advocate for your patients and I saw the importance of that on this day. This experience made me think about for encounters like this in the future, I want to be an advocate and help reassure that their feelings are valid. I wish I could have done more in that moment, but now all I can do is learn from my mistakes and hope that I can do better in the future.
Death with Dignity
Prior to coming to college, I was unfamiliar with the death with dignity law. The first time I was exposed to it was during my ethics class at UNE a few years ago. We watched a documentary about people who decided to die with dignity and the process that they had to go through to be able to do that. When I first heard about this law, I was not sure what my feelings were about it. I did not know much about it, and I did not want to form an opinion about it until I was able to investigate it more. At first, I think I didn’t completely agree with the law, but after learning about it a few years ago, my opinion changed. The biggest principle that I follow throughout my life is being respectful of others’ opinions whether or not I believe the same things. I also believe that people should be able to make their own decisions, especially regarding decisions that involve life or death. When it comes to healthcare, people make life-saving decisions all the time. I feel like it is fair for them to be able to make life-ending decisions too. As a nurse, it is always important to be respectful of the decisions of the patients even if you do not agree.
The ethical principle of non-maleficence means that healthcare workers should never intentionally cause any harm to the patient. The dictionary definition of harm is to damage or injure physically or mentally. When it comes to death with dignity, people question if it follows the non-maleficence principle. In my opinion, I question if death with dignity can really be considered harm. It is obviously causing their death, but it is not unwanted or has intention to cause harm to the patient. When someone decides that they want to die with dignity, it must be thought through thoroughly and they are given many opportunities to change their mind. Is giving someone the opportunity to make a decision that they genuinely want means that they are intentionally causing harm? There seems to be a fine line between what people believe is right and wrong when it comes to the death with dignity law, and I am sure that this topic could be, and will be, debated for a long time .
Proposing Change
Our group decided to focus on the topic of infection control. We learned throughout nursing school that preventing hospital acquired infections is a top priority of most hospitals. It was not until we got onto the unit that we realized how prominent this issue is. Seeing the statistics on how common HAIs are was eye opening. We found that the best way for reducing these numbers were just by education. The longer I spend in nursing school and being exposed to healthcare, the more I realized how many things can be avoided just by prevention and education.
Our topic was recommended by one group member, and everyone agreed that infection control was a great idea to do our project on. In the beginning, our draft needed to be changed slightly but there was no need to revise the topic. Our team worked well together and made sure assignments were submitted on time. We had a group chat to be able to communicate effectively and there were no issues or challenges that needed to be solved.
The findings of this report can easily be applied for my future nursing practice. Even though I am not a nurse yet, I am a huge advocate in prevention. I love educating patients and family members on health-related issues and how prevention can improve their overall wellbeing. For this project, I learned that it is important for nurses to be educated on how to prevent HAIs. I can now incorporate these methods of infection control into my future nursing practice and hopefully be able to prevent my patients from having complications that can be preventable.
