Collaboration Cafe

PICOT Question Worksheet

Name: Barkisu Fortenberry

1) Identify and describe one practice-related issue or concern.  You may choose to build on the practice issue you identified in NR500NP/NR501NP. Provide support for the issue from scholarly nursing sources current within the last 5 years.

  Abdominal pains during the pregnancy period are not unusual but it is very scary (Maylawati, et al., 2017). The pain may range from sharp and stabbing to dull and achy.  Today, more pregnant women who have a gestation of 22 weeks and above are visiting the outpatient department complaining of abdominal pains. These pains can however be managed at home effectively to prevent the frequent visits in the hospital that increases the workload and increased cost of care. It is therefore important to come up with a way of addressing this issue to ensure that the patients are satisfied, their concerns are addressed and at the same time the issue of frequent visits in the outpatient department is addressed.

2) Explain why the issue/concern is important to nurse practitioner practice and the issue’s impact on health outcomes. Provide support for the importance of the issue from scholarly nursing sources current within the last 5 years.

When these patients visit the healthcare facility, a nurse must do a thorough evaluation of every patient at all stages of pregnancy. During this assessment, the nurse will physically examine the patient and check the fetal heart rate, blood pressure, and abdominal palpation (Maylawati, et al., 2017). This process is comprehensive, and thus it takes a lot of time to handle one patient. As a result, there is a considerable workload and increased dissatisfaction of the patients. This is amid the big issue of nurse shortages in most healthcare facilities. Higher patient loads are associated with negative satisfaction with the nurse's job. There are also increased cases of medical errors. Many patients die every year in the United States due to medical errors, many of which can be prevented. The victims of medical errors reach far beyond the patient. For instance, the caregivers and the staff involved in the medical errors (second victim) usually sustain psychological harm when involved in the errors that harm the patients as they give care to them. Some nurses are profoundly affected by potentially lasting consequences.

3) Define each element of your PICOT question in one or two sentences.

P-Population and problem 

The current data illustrates that there has been a very high rate of unnecessary visits in the healthcare facilities by pregnant women with a gestation period of twenty-two weeks and more with complaints of mild abdominal pains. This has resulted in increased workload in the healthcare facilities, increasing the healthcare cost, medical errors and decreasing the patients' satisfaction.

I–Intervention 

The use of mobile apps that helps in tracking pregnancy right from the first trimester to the third trimester are very important since they help in educating and notifying the mothers on the various signs and symptoms that they will expect during the various stages of pregnancy, such as acne, breast tenderness, back pains, uterine cramps, among many others (Garg, Arora, & Kaur, 2020). These can be done remotely, saving time and resources. Additionally, these women can communicate with healthcare workers using these apps, which reduces the number of hospital visits. 

C–Comparison

The education on the patients on the abdominal pains is held to ensure that the patients can understand between the abnormal signs and the typical signs and symptoms during the second and the third trimester. These patients are also educated on how they can differentiate between the false and the actual labor pains, thus knowing when they have to visit the hospitals and when not.

O–Outcome 

It is expected that through the use of these applications, there will be a reduced number of unnecessary visits that involve pregnant women with a gestation period of 22 weeks and above.

 

T–Timeframe 

This initiative will take four months where after the integration of the mobile app use, it will be observed whether the rates of flow in the healthcare facility will have reduced among this population.

PICOT question in the standard PICOT question format (narrative) and define each letter separately, such as:  

P = pregnant women at the gestation period of 22 weeks and over

I = will the pregnancy tracking mobile apps help this population complaining of the abdominal pain

C = in comparison to the nurse education on the abdominal pain

O = decreasing the outpatient visits

T = four months

PICOT Question was written in full: for the pregnant women at the gestation period of 22 weeks and above, will the tracking mobile apps help for abdominal pain in comparison with the nurses' education on the abdominal pain to help decrease the outpatient visits within four months.

References

Garg, N., Arora, S., & Kaur, K. (2020). Application of mobile technology for disease and treatment monitoring of gestational diabetes mellitus among pregnant women: a systematic review. Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, 1932296820965577. retrieved from: Application of Mobile Technology for Disease and Treatment Monitoring of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus Among Pregnant Women: A Systematic Review - Nidhi Garg, Shaima K. A., Sandeep Arora, Kiranjeet Kaur, 2020 (sagepub.com)

Maylawati, D. S. A., Ramdhani, M. A., Zulfikar, W. B., Taufik, I., & Darmalaksana, W. (2017, August). Expert system for predicting the early pregnancy with disorders using artificial neural network. In 2017 5th International Conference on Cyber and IT Service Management (CITSM) (pp. 1-6). IEEE. retrieved from: Expert system for predicting the early pregnancy with disorders using artificial neural network | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

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