An in-depth examination of a specific patient is provided via a case study. In the field of nursing, case studies concentrate on particular individuals and offer details on their symptoms, medical background, and diagnoses.
Case Study Applications
On the basis of the patients’ symptoms, medical histories, and other pertinent facts, nursing students may be asked to diagnose patients in case studies.
As an alternative, instructors may ask nursing students to create original case studies. The students use an example of a case they have handled to discuss the patient, the symptoms, the diagnosis, the therapies, and data from a physical examination.
Benefits
Nursing students can put their classroom knowledge to the test in a more practical, clinical setting by reading a case study and developing a diagnosis. Writing case studies is another effective educational technique because it compels students to consider the full range of a patient’s care, from gathering crucial data to diagnosing and treating the illness.
Tips
To successfully complete a case study, attention must be paid to and pertinent information must be obtained. Asking the appropriate questions is one of the finest ways to achieve this. Consider the patient’s attributes, such as age, sex, profession, and place of residence.
Vital signs including blood pressure and temperature should be monitored by students. They ought to think about the signs as well: Just how bad are they? They started when? Students who are writing and reading case studies can have enough knowledge to make a better diagnosis by asking lots of questions and gathering lots of information.
Special Qualities of Nursing Students
In busy medical facilities, caring for sick and injured patients takes a special mindset and set of abilities. If students are smart, diligent, and passionate about helping people, they may have what it takes to become nurses.
Nursing requires extensive training since it is challenging to remain composed and skilled in life-or-death circumstances. Students who study nursing gain the unique traits and practical skills necessary for this profession.
Empathy
Students who want to lessen human suffering and are sensitive and caring often find nursing occupations appealing. Patients who are scared, angry, or disturbed can be better understood and consoled by people who genuinely care about other people’s feelings.
Someone who is kind and nonjudgmental will elicit more important health information from patients, such as their usage of illegal drugs. Researchers found that empathic nurses report long-term job satisfaction in a study that was published in a 2003 edition of The Journal of Clinical Nursing.
Tolerance to stress
As they advance in a nursing degree, students are given more authority. The workload may seem overwhelming. It’s important to be able to work under pressure and meet deadlines in order to successfully complete courses.
According to Laramie County Community College, nursing education equips students with the skills necessary to “think and act under tremendous stress” in the workplace. By taking care of oneself and making time for hobbies outside of school, nursing students can better handle the mentally and physically taxing components of training.
Attention to Detail
O*Net reports that in order to manage the demands of several patients at once, nurses must be accurate, analytical, and well-organized. When obtaining vital signs, entering data into a patient’s records, and carrying out treatments under close observation, accuracy is crucial.
Any errors must be reported right away to a supervisor so they can be fixed. A thorough planner can help students manage their time, set goals, and track their progress.
Emotional Balance
Due to the stress of their work and everyday encounters, nurses need to be able to control their emotions. Nursing students and other caregivers may experience stress as a result of continuing to support patients and families who are suffering with serious or fatal illnesses.
Anxiety in the workplace can be reduced by having a pleasant personality, a good attitude, and an even temperament. According to the College Board, nurses must have confidence in their ability to act decisively in challenging circumstances. If students struggle with self-doubt or boundaries, they are recommended to seek counseling.
Integrity and morality
Patients count on nurses to be trustworthy, capable, truthful, and honest. To guarantee effective patient care, nursing students must adhere to the norms and regulations of their academic program, the nursing profession, and clinical placements.
For instance, the National Student Nurses Association’s accepted code of ethics places a strong emphasis on respecting patient privacy, speaking out for patient safety, and abstaining from behaviors that can endanger the patient.
Important Chemistry Topics for Nursing Students
In the discipline of nursing, analytical thinking and practical knowledge are essential. Nursing programs require students to take a variety of general education courses in order to build these abilities. These classes cover topics including science, algebra, history, and culture.
Programs differ in the kinds of chemistry courses that nursing students must take, although many require them to complete general chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and pharmacology courses.
Basic Chemistry
Students enrolled in nursing programs are required to take general chemistry in order to better comprehend the constituents of our world and to get ready for higher-level nursing courses. This two-semester course exposes students to both the theoretical and practical sides of chemistry through both lecture and laboratory components
The periodic table of elements, states of matter, thermochemistry, bonding, and chemical equations are among the subjects covered in the majority of beginning chemistry courses.
Natural Chemistry
One or two semesters of organic chemistry with a laboratory section are usually required of nursing students. Because organic chemistry concentrates on a specific class of matter that contains carbon atoms, general chemistry is a prerequisite.
It focuses in particular on the research of organic molecules and compounds, namely their structure and characteristics. Because nurses deal with organic materials almost completely, organic chemistry is helpful to nursing students. Students in this course study the characteristics, conduct, and chemical reactivity of organic matter.
Biochemistry
Biochemistry, which focuses on issues such proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids, and metabolism, is the study of chemical reactions that take place inside the living organism. A laboratory component of biochemistry gives nursing students more practice doing chemical research.
General chemistry and an introductory biology course are two prerequisites that are frequently required for biochemistry. This course is frequently taken in conjunction with organic chemistry by nursing students.
Pharmacology
The subject matter of the advanced upper-level course pharmacology involves medications and medication interactions. Nursing students need to take this course because part of their job involves giving patients drugs.
Students studying pharmacology gain knowledge of how medications affect the body’s natural and synthetic processes, as well as how they change the course of disease. Pharmacology frequently has a general chemistry requirement, but many institutions also demand that students complete organic chemistry before taking pharmacology.
How to Use a Concept Map for Nursing to Apply Critical Thinking
Critical thinking entails reasoning in a way that encourages self-reflection on one’s own ideas, deeds, and knowledge. It can be used while developing an idea map in nursing. An illustration of a patient’s difficulties, nursing actions that can solve those problems, and the connections between the concepts is called a concept map.
By using critical thinking to analyze a concept map, a nurse can better understand the patient’s requirements and decide how best to provide for them.
How to Use a Concept Map for Nursing to Apply Critical Thinking
Step 1
Assess the situation and gather data. Inquire about the patient’s present health issues. Ask about his past medical history, examine him physically, and search his medical records for any details that can help explain his illness, such as lab findings.
Step 2
Sketch out a concept map. Write down the medical diagnosis of the patient, followed by any health issues or nursing assessment findings that have the greatest impact on the patient. For instance, while heart failure may be the official medical diagnosis, the nursing evaluation result for same condition can be “activity intolerance.” Create nursing diagnoses that most accurately reflect the issues you learned about from the assessment’s findings.
Step 3
Search for relationships among the nursing diagnoses. The nursing diagnosis of “activity intolerance” and “imbalanced diet; less than body requirements” are connected. Patients with activity intolerance experience fatigue even after minimal effort.
Due to activity intolerance, the patient might be too exhausted to eat, which would result in inadequate nutritional intake, which is the cause of the second nursing diagnostic. You might discover via the linkages that one issue is some other issues’ primary cause. You are aware that in this situation, similar nursing interventions may be used to address these connected problems.
Step 4
Look over your concept map. Take a look at every nursing diagnosis you have listed there that explains the issues with your patient. When choosing the nursing treatments that will best address these issues, take into account the links or relationships you earlier identified. Put the nursing diagnoses that correspond to the interventions next to them. Implement the interventions, then assess how well they worked for your patient.
Nursing Qualitative Research Topics
Research that is qualitative collects data about human behavior and then examines its consequences. The field of nursing uses research to increase its body of knowledge. Researchers employ qualitative research techniques to develop and improve nursing care and to increase the legitimacy of the nursing profession.
Goals for Qualitative Research
Nursing is becoming more and more interested in qualitative research. Researchers focus particularly on the why and how as they explore the what, where, and when of their subject. It is fundamental to the research to examine the reasons behind people’s actions as well as their methods.
Strong hypotheses form the basis of effective research, which then seeks to confirm or refute them. Choose a topic and an outcome when creating a study hypothesis, such as “Antidepressants promote mental well-being.”
Elderly Patients
Concerns for older patients are a significant research area in the nursing sector. Researchers look on how pharmaceuticals affect patients’ lifestyles, elder abuse both inside and outside the system, and depression in senior living facility residents.
In a hypothesis for this topic, depression in senior patients with and without family visits might be compared. An example of a hypothesis may be, “Senior patients who have family visit them frequently are less likely to experience depression than those who do not.”
Stress
Researchers that utilize qualitative methods also look at the connection between stress and the things that either produce or lessen it. The impact of stress on behavior, performance, health, and relationships has been studied.
Examining patients’ medical histories and how stress impacts their daily lives may be part of a research hypothesis on patients’ stress. A hypothesis might read, for instance, “Patients who need long-term care and are unable to continue with their prior obligations experience stress due to a lack of control in their lives.”
Medication
One of the main areas of nursing care is medication. Researchers who use qualitative methods examine the effects of medications on patients as well as how the environment affects those effects. Nursing uses a wide variety of pharmaceuticals, hence the field offers a variety of study topics. They might create a hypothesis on a certain drug and how it affects patients, or they might contrast and compare two drugs that are comparable.
How to present a case study in nursing
An in-depth analysis of a circumstance that a nurse experiences in the course of her work is a nursing case study. A safe way for the nurse to apply theoretical and practical knowledge to a patient setting is through a case study. Without hurting a patient, she can use her decision-making ability, critical thinking to examine the circumstance, and cognitive reasoning skills.
In undergraduate nursing programs, graduate programs leading to a master of science in nursing (MSN), and orientation sessions for newly graduated nurses, nursing case studies are frequently used. They could be delivered live in a classroom, online, or in printed form.
Select a subject. Sigma Theta Tau International states that the subject should be narrow, grounded in truth, and pertinent. It ought to illustrate the most recent, evidence-based nursing practices. The nurse may decide to go into detail about a circumstance from his past experiences or something related to his current position.
Outline your goals. At least three learning goals—also known as outcomes—that describe what the learner will achieve from finishing the case study should be included. Learning objectives like “Identify five risk factors for falls in older persons” are written as specific, quantifiable activities.
Create a brief introduction. This should be a one- or two-paragraph summary that introduces the patient, the event, and any pertinent information. A brief summary of the patient’s prior experiences can also be included in the introduction.
Include more backstory and history. The student is given more in-depth information to examine the problem in the following one to two paragraphs, including lab results, the findings of diagnostic tests, the results of the nurse’s assessment of the patient, and a more thorough patient history.
Create inquiries. Case studies in nursing are interactive situations that encourage examination and critical thought. In order to answer the questions, the student usually needs to use the nursing process (assessment, nursing diagnosis, planning, intervention, and evaluation) and predict what will happen next in the given circumstance.
Give criticism. The nursing case study offers the learner two different sorts of feedback, informational and reinforcing, according to Sigma Theta Tau. The learner receives informational feedback to determine whether she has successfully answered questions and to gauge her progress through the patient scenario.
Feedback that is reinforced provides the learner with more details about her responses to the questions. She will be informed of the justification for her accurate response if she correctly answers the query. Reinforcing feedback informs her of the reasons why her response is incorrect if she provides a false response.
cite your sources. It’s crucial to direct the learner toward more reading material or online resources that offer learning opportunities.