Wound/Ostomy Nurse

I work with children and babies.  Specifically I oversee a team of nurses who provide wound care and ostomy care for these patients.  We do a lot of teaching, mostly to parents, but on occasion to patients themselves.  Often times patients are sent home before a wound is healed.  In these instances we teach the family how to care for the wound, change the dressing, and provide nutrition for improved healing.  We also teach them to contact their primary care physician or our team for any concerns and teach them what to be concerned about. 

Many of our patients have new gastrostomy tubes.  Parents are usually nervous about caring for these.  We teach them how to take care of their child, and what to do if the tube gets pulled out.  

Like adults, children and babies sometimes need to have an ostomy created.  These are usually temporary in the pediatric population.  Despite the temporary nature, it is a difficult adjustment.  We teach the parents about the digestive tract, how to care for the ostomy, and what to expect. 

All health care providers are involved in education.  The more education we can give to our patients and families, the more comfortable and competent they are in their care at home.

Information Retrieval

You used an electronic index, a guideline index, and a web search engine to retrieve information relevant to your clinical problem. Compare and contrast your results. Which resources were useful/ not useful for your information retrieval task, and why?

I used both Pubmed and CINAHL electronic databases to run similar searches.  Pubmed produced a larger number of articles.  Approximately half of the articles produced by the CINAHL search provided full-text articles.  There were very few full-text articles available from the Pubmed results.  I then ran a search on Google using similar criteria (including RCTs and meta-analysis).  This produced thousands more articles (466,000), was much faster, did not require multiple screens or access through the university library, and had immediate full-text for all articles that I clicked on.  The AHRQ site provides sites that have guidelines developed by specific organizations from clinical evidence.  I would consider this the most trusted site for evidence-based information.