Reflection on Addiction in Nursing: Evidence Based Research

I was able to meet the Provider of Care learning outcome with this assignment because my evidenced based practice project allowed me to have deeper appreciation for what "evidenced based” truly entails. This assignment required me to review a considerable amount of literature written on the topic I had chosen, the affect that substance use disorders amongst nurses has on the profession. This topic was pertinent to my practice, and as such, was of particular importance to me. This assignment also assisted me in achieving the learning outcome in terms of the profession possessing "integrated wholeness”.

Addiction has become known as a family disease process in that, in addition to affecting the addicted individual, it ravages the lives of everyone who is close to him or her. Indeed, a nurse's addiction affects not only that particular nurse and his or her patients, but also nursing colleagues. Thus, combating the issue of impaired nursing staff is important when entertaining the idea of the profession remaining cohesive and unified.

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I feel that this assignment gave me a better understanding of how to critique a source in terms of reliability and trustworthiness.

Prior to this course, I had not considered all of the many steps which go into determining whether or not a source should be incorporated into an assignment. Items such as an author's background, study ethics, discussion of limitations, and so on were things that I had never truly considered previously and this assignment solidified the importance of considering such matters when deciding if a source is of any use to me.

As mentioned, my greatest success in the completion of this assignment related to my further understanding of critiquing research. The article analysis grids, although quite time consuming, required me to consider many different components of the research articles which I had selected and I am confident that I will be able to incorporate these learning experiences into future course assignments. Searching for information on the backgrounds of the authors of my research articles proved to be the greatest challenge that I had encountered. I found that finding such information can be a difficult task, particularly for those authors who may not have been affiliated with a university or major medical organization.

I did recognize that some of the articles I had provided contact information for the authors and this is something that I will likely take advantage of in the future when not constrained by imminent due dates. This assignment allowed me to make connections with virtually all other writing assignments in this program which had required me to source others' work. In working on the evidenced based practice project, I found myself reflecting on sources that I had used in previous assignments and questioning whether or not they were appropriate. In a previous assignment in this course, we had been required to critique a website which pertained to our research topic. In that assignment, I had concluded that the website I selected had not met many of the criteria for a credible website, and thus, had decided not to include it in my final assignment. In reviewing one of the research articles which I had decided to incorporate, I noticed that it referenced the same website which I had considered inappropriate, and this connection caused me to question the validity of the article I was reading. I had felt that this was another good example of why it is so important to not simply take a source at face-value but to do as much analyzing and investigation as possible so as to ensure that a person's work is based off of sound and accurate information.