I have chosen the self-care of nurses and how it affects patient outcomes as my quality improvement process. Searching through the Walden Library is much like using PubMed or other university libraries I have used in the past. I like that it is through EBSCO. I found in the past that EBSCO seems to provide a broader search result than some of the other search engines. I entered self-care for the nurse into the search bar. There were 4637 results.
Unfortunately, these results did not all fit what I needed. In fact, many of them were not related to the nurse but to the patient and how the nurse’s education on self-care affected the patient outcomes. This led me to reword my search phrase.
One of the results of lack of nurse’s self-care is burnout. I entered self-care and nursing burnout into the search bar. This time I
received 96 results. They were much more related to the topic.
This is still a large number of results. I changed it again to say nursing and burnout patient outcomes. The result was six studies. These studies included the rational, impact, Joint Commission view of burnout as a hot topic and proposed protocols for nurse self-care. Each of these studies brought a different view of the impact of burnout.
Burnout can be directly related to the lack of self-care of the nurse. Perhaps I need to restate my topic to include burnout instead of lack of self-care. Although the result is the same, previous research would lead me to reword the topic.
This exercise was quite beneficial in helping me understand how I need to proceed. Is it common to have a change in topic this far into the process? Is this accepted? Is there a better way to work through the search engine than to reword the keywords and phrases entered?
Thank you for your post it is very interesting. I do not think you should change your topic as burnout is an outcome of lack of self-care. We cannot be effective care providers if we do not take care of ourselves. It is a good topic that certainly needs to be addressed. It will make a great practice problem.
I used CINHAL in the Walden library. I was able to find many current relevant articles on my critical question topic lack of reliable information on the covid vaccine causing vaccine hesitancy. I tried EBSCO and did not find as many articles. It probably is dependent on the site and which topic you are searching for.
In this week required reading Dang&Dearholt textbook the chapter searching for evidence was very thorough. That chapter has step by step instructions on how to narrow your search for better results. I really found it helpful and used it for my search. That chapter also has details on what the different sites: CINHAL, Medline, EBSCO and other resources are used for.
Keep searching for lack of self-care. You have a worthwhile subject. You can make a difference.