Category: Change

My team members and I are awaiting feedback on our dissemination project. I am looking forward to getting this feedback to see how it can be applied to clinical practice.

The topic of our project is emphasizing the importance of accurate intake and outputs. Through the research that my group and I did, we found how important intake and output is. With extra research done with this topic, I know that I will be sure to chart accurate intake and output, including the IV fluids. Understanding the importance of accurate intake and output could also allow me to have positive effect on my colleagues. Charting IV fluids or drinks are intake numbers that can sometime be forgotten in healthcare.  Additionally, we also discovered the automated urine output devices. I had never heard of this device before, so this new information would be helpful to bring into my career, especially if the place I work at does not have this device.

              I felt that I played a positive role on the impact of the team. I usually sit in the background and just put in my part and someone else takes charge. However, I feel that with this project, I took more of a leadership role. Of course, I collaborated with all members of my team, but it felt good being able to play a leadership role in this process and I think it will help me to take charge in other situations, which I don’t normally do. This is something that I could let me future employer know about to show that I can work as a team in both the leadership position and the team member contributor position. I will let them know that I am an easy person to collaborate with and that I have past experience in quality improvement and evidence-based practice initiatives.

            The team members and I all worked really well together, and everyone played their part. Although, we had 8 members of the team, I feel that we all did an equal amount of work. I was worried about this going into beginning this project because I know that when there are multiple people working on one project, the process can be a bit difficult. With all of this being said, I am proud of what my team and I have created, and I hope that the final product is able to provide positive intervention in clinical practice.

Through researching our topic regarding the important of accurate intake and output charting including IV fluids and medication drips, we found that there has already been research to determine why this issue is happening. In past research, it was found that a major cause of inaccurate charting of intake and output is the lack of awareness in the importance this data. This task if commonly overlooked in a nurse’s and other health care workers job tasks. There is a device that is an automated urine output device. This is new device that nobody in my group has heard of so it was interesting to gain some insight on this device. We are all currently placed on the cardiac floor at Maine Medical Center where almost all of the patients are placed on strict intake and output measurements. Although the orders are placed, it is sometimes difficult to get it perfect. Implementing this device onto R7 at MMC would be so beneficial to the floor and patient outcomes.

Prior to this research and having clinical experience on a cardiac floor, I did not realize how important accurate intake and output was. I wondered if other students, CNAs, and nurses were aware of the importance of this documentation. Providers may base certain orders or medications on these numbers. A research study that we had found during our research said that after education, promotion of best practice, and varying audits on cardiac patients specifically, 100% of staff became compliant and 75% of patients became involved. This numbers are amazing and really show how educating both our staff and patients can provide much more accuracy into intake and output. With this study and information, I will continue to promote and advocate for more accurate charting of intake and output as I feel that it can be a forgetting about concept in patient care.

The process of creating the topic proposal for this project was a very great and easy-going experience. Each member of my team worked together to create a concise, but informative topic proposal. We got right to the point while also incorporating important data from our research that helped to support our proposal. We were unsure how we were going to all work on this project together because our group consists of 8 people which can make it difficult to all work on one project together and split the work evenly. However, my group collaborated and was able to work together efficiently and evenly. There were minimal revisions that we needed to make after the submission of our draft, just some minor spacing issues and re-wording of certain sentences. I am looking forward to working with this group on the final part of the Dissemination project!