NRC and Nursing-Student Workflow
Development of the Nursing Resource Center at Thomson Gale has required careful research and close collaboration with nursing instructors, nursing students, and the librarians that support them. Part of Gale’s research process also involved consulting various nursing fundamentals textbooks and reviewing nursing curricula from schools across the United States. Gale’s research revealed that early classes in any nursing program cover the “Nursing Process” in considerable depth. This process is a standardized one that first organizes how students learn to care for patients, and then guides their treatment of every patient they approach throughout their careers. According to the American Nurses Association’s last revision of its Standards of Practice, the steps in the process are: Assessment, Diagnosis, Outcome identification, Implementation, and Evaluation. Each of these stages has various actions associated with them, and the results pages for any searches executed in the Nursing Resource Center are organized to closely reflect this process.
One of Gale’s standard organizational tools in its databases is the use of tabs that allow us to sort and label different kinds of content in a results list in a meaningful way. So, when a student conducts a search from the opening page of the Nursing Resource Center he or she will see their results organized beneath the tabs listed below. Students should find the database easy to use because of the resource’s correlation to the Nursing Process. Gale has written definitions for each tab and those, too, follow below.
Diseases: Disease articles from encyclopedias and nursing textbooks will appear under this tab providing the ideal “first stop” for students needing a thorough, succinct disease overview. Disease articles will include definitions, descriptions, causes and symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, prognoses, and more.
Assessments: This tab will list ways to gather subjective, objective, and patient assessment data when such information is relevant to your search.
Diagnostics: The Diagnostics tab will list various means of gathering objective data from a patient beyond the physical assessment. These entries will provide overviews of diagnostic tests including rationales, patient preparation, normal and abnormal results.
Interventions: The Interventions tab will list various procedures and the skills needed to conduct them that might be performed while treating a patient with a specific disease and/or diagnosis.
Drugs: Drug administration is a specific type of intervention. The Drugs tab will display monographs for the drugs used to treat the diagnosis and the drugs that are contraindicated in some way for a diagnosis.
Care Plans: The Care Plans tab will display sample care plans that are relevant to the conducted search. The general theory and definitions of outcome planning, implementation, and evaluation will be covered. The plans will always include assessment, nursing diagnosis (NIC/NOC), expected outcomes, interventions with rationales and evaluations.
Multimedia: This tab will display short, dynamic videos of various diseases or conditions at work in the human body in three-dimensions. These videos bring anatomy and physiology to life in a way that flat illustrations in books cannot.
Journal Citations/Journals: Depending on the full-text access rights at various institutions this tab will provide either the indexed information for a relevant journal article or the full-text for that article. Having these journal results available alongside disease and drug overviews will save students from having to use multiple databases or sources to find research articles for their classes.
Related Articles: This tab will capture the articles that relate to the searched topic but don’t fit neatly into the preceding, specific tabs. For a disease search on “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” this Related Articles tab might return entries on general nursing theory topics (e.g. the history of the nursing process, or legal aspects of nursing) asbestos, workplace conditions, smoking cessation, and so on. These articles could be used to complete reports or for patient teaching. Anatomy and physiology, oxygenation fundamentals, nutrition basics, human development overviews and other foundational chapters would be found in this tab.
K. MillsonMarch 13, 2007
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