Shannon Olsen

Evidence-based Practice

22 January 2023

Thinking About the Journey

              Past experiences, future hopes, and assumptions that I have for my future career will all influence how I contribute and learn from the course, Evidence-Based Practice. I hadn’t always wanted to be a nurse before coming to college, but that all changed when I toured the University of New England. Once I toured the University and learned more about the nursing program, I fell in love with it and completely switched my career path to become a nurse. I started working as a personal care assistant at a retirement home near me over the summer, which deepened my passion for healthcare and caused my motivation to become a nurse to skyrocket. As I started school I realized that I would love to work as a registered nurse at a hospital and then someday go back to school after working a few years in the field to get my master’s in nursing. I want to become a nurse for many reasons including job security, a decent income, multiple career paths within the field, and having every day at my workplace be a different routine/schedule with new challenges. Most importantly, I wanted to become a nurse so that I could do something important for the world and feel a sense of purpose in my everyday job. As I go through my clinical rotations through school I start to learn new things about each field of nursing. I have grown sparks of interests for multiple fields in nursing, and through the course Evidence-Based Practice I will gain knowledge to help myself in my future career.

              I have grown an interest in multiple specialties of nursing including labor and delivery, travel nursing, and hospice nursing. I am mostly leaning towards labor and delivery for a nursing specialty because I have family members who are labor and delivery nurses, I love working with mothers and children, and also the experience of the birthing process is amazing to me. I would love to help make the birthing process as comfortable and as safe as possible for mothers. I also have a spark of interest for travel nursing because I like traveling and it is one of my goals to travel across the country when I graduate college. Travel nursing also provides a good source of income and helps provide different scenarios and experiences for nurses. Hospice nursing sparks an interest in me because I have worked in a retirement home for end-of-life care and made great connections with my patients and coworkers. Hospice care is a field that would be challenging and emotional, but also give me a great sense of purpose as it did when I worked as a personal care assistant a few summers ago.

              I had prior assumptions about this Evidence-Based Practice course before navigating its Brightspace and listening to reviews from past students. I assume that Evidence-Based practice would be a class where I go through case studies with my peers and start learning how to make prognoses about potential patients I may come across in the future. I made this assumption just based off of the title of the class and how when I practice nursing skills, I should have evidence to back up what skills I am practicing and why. Looking back at the course objectives I could definitely use this course to help me in my future career by applying what I have learned into my other courses and real-life situations. For example, I could practice nursing skills during my clinicals and proceed to look up information/evidence to further understand the process of the skills I am performing and why I need to perform them. For other courses such as Adult Health II, I can use my skills that I will learn In Evidence-Based Practice such as leadership skills, providing safe care to clients using information management skills, and imbedding the moral values I learn about in my work/class discussions. I can learn a lot from this course, Evidence-Based Practice, because it will help guide me in my success in my other nursing classes and future career by showing me how to provide safe/quality care using research/evidence-seeking skills.