This is a graded discussion board with several parts.

Writing is all about connections. So far, your personal essay has connected you and me–student and professor. The experiences you’ve lived and your feelings about them are open for my vicarious participation.

I’m a wonderfully empathetic reader! But I also want you to have a sympathetic reader. What’s the difference?

Sympathy, constructed from the Greek sym, meaning “together,” and pathos, referring to feelings or emotion, is used when one person shares the feelings of another, as when one experiences sadness when someone close is experiencing grief or loss. Empathy is a newer word also related to “pathos.” It differs from sympathy in carrying an implication of greater emotional distance. With empathy, you can imagine or understand how someone might feel, without necessarily having those feelings yourself. (Merriam-Webster, n.d.)

When I read your experiences as a nurse, I can imagine what it is like to be a nurse, but we have a whole class full of other nurses who will “get” your story in a much more direct way. Let’s connect you to each other!

In addition to making a personal connection, this discussion will also begin your connection to the academic conversation–to the literature.

Instructions:

1. Create a thread.
   • Give the thread a title that will help others understand the content of your essay. You may want to include the problem and the population (e.g., “High turnover of new nurses”).
   • Copy and paste the first paragraph from your essay into the text of the post. Do NOT include your cover letter or write any explanations about your essay. Potential readers will decide if they want to read your essay based only on the first paragraph.
   • Attach your full final draft as a Word file. (As with the file you submitted as your final draft, it should be free from all tracked changes, comments, instructor notes, and cover letter. Just a nice, clean essay.)
2. Call dibs.
   • Look at the titles of your peers’ posts for subjects that interest you or are similar to yours. Read their intro paragraphs (the body of their posts).
   • When you find one you like, reply with the word “Dibs.” That’s it. Just call “dibs” and submit. You can claim any post you like, so long as it isn’t already claimed. You do not need to reciprocate with the person who claims your post.
   • Wait a minute and refresh to make sure no one else was calling dibs at the same time. If two people simultaneously claim the same post, the one on top wins. The other must call dibs on a different essay.
3. Read the essay.
   • Read the full thing, start to finish, without interruptions or taking any notes.
   • Read it a second time, taking notes however you like. You can print a copy and write on it, use Comments in Word, or jot your thoughts onto a separate paper. This is entirely for you, and will not be turned in.
4. Reply to their post, answering the following questions:
   • What was the plot of the story? (Not the theme nor what is it about, but the main event or events that were narrated in the essay. Tell, in brief, what happened. No need to critique how well it was done. You’re just reflecting back to them what you understood to be the events of the essay.)
   • What were your feelings as you read the story?
   • Why did the storyteller tell this story? (The theme, or purpose in sharing, may be explicit or implied.)
   • What in your own experience connects to the experiences of the writer?
   • What is something you know from your own experience, reading, or education that would likely interest the writer?
   • What is one idea or theme that the writer mentions that you think they might explore in their research paper?
   • Make a list of key words or phrases relevant to the essay you read. Keep them concise–short, precise terms that would work in a search engine are best. They may be taken from the essay or you may supply them. Come up with at least 6, and put an * next to the 3 that you think are the most important.
5. Do a search.
   • Use the key words you identified in the last step to conduct a database search. Start with the 3 most important (with the * on them). Use the instructions found in LM4’s Lecture Materials on how to conduct a search in CINAHL or one of the alternatives listed.
   • Identify ONE article that you think would be helpful to the author if they choose to write their classical argument essay on the same topic as their personal essay. Note that there’s nothing wrong with sharing an article that you plan to use yourself. That’s just good collaboration!
     • Article must be from a peer-reviewed journal.
     • It must be no more than 10 years old. Ideally, look for 5 years old or less.
     • It may be a study or a literature review. It may provide evidence of the scope of the problem OR explore a possible solution.
     • Make sure that the full text is available. You may not need to read the entire thing yourself, but read enough of it to make sure it will really be useful.
6. Share the article.
   • Reply again to the same writer’s post. This time supply:
     • The last name of the author. If there are two authors of the article, provide both last names in the same order as they are shown on the publication. If there are 3 or more authors, give the last name of the author named first in the publication and follow it with “et al.”
     • The year of publication. (Some articles may have a date for online publication and a later date of print publication. Give the date of print publication.)
     • The full title of the article. (Use copy and paste.)
     • A functional link to the full text of the article. Use copy and paste so there’s no typos and check to make sure it works.
     • What database did you use? What search terms, modes, or limitations did you use to locate this article? (The student may wish to replicate your search, so tell them how.)
     • One or two sentences telling your writer  why you picked the article or what you think they will find useful in it.
7. Say thank you.
   • Once you receive both the reply (the answers to part 4) and the article (part 6), check out the article. If you don’t love it, you don’t have to read the entire thing. But read enough of it that you can understand why the other student suggested it to you. (If the link doesn’t work, use the author, date, and title info provided to locate the article yourself.)
   • Reply to say thank you for the work they did, and mention one thing you liked about the article, or how you might use it, or something you appreciated about their insights. One or two sentences is enough. Even if you decide not to use the article they chose, you don’t have to say that. They put in time and thought to make a bridge from your experience to their experience to the body of literature.

Why not let everyone do their own research? Don’t worry, you will. Ultimately, you will be responsible for your own research, including deciding whether or not to use the article provided. As Walker and Tschanz (2013) suggest, a story’s significance may shift depending on the focus you choose and “pondering the relevance of available literature…can bring new insights” (p. 84). There is value in considering the focus of your experience as it looked through someone else’s eyes and the relevance of the literature they provided. This exercise should help you see your own story from a different perspective, and recognize that there’s not just one “right” way to approach an academic topic.

It will also be a low-risk, low-investment first experience with conducting a literature search. You only need to find one article, and it doesn’t have to be the world’s greatest article either. It just has to be relevant. Don’t spend too much time on this search, since there’s a chance that your peer will decide not to use it anyway. The value is in the practice, so when you go to conduct a search on your own key words, you are more familiar with the tools.

You’ll also get practice responding to a peer. In this exchange, you are reading the final draft, so you aren’t critiquing the writing at all. No need to judge! You just need to respond to it with sympathy and reflect back what you see as its meaning. Hopefully this is a low-stress introduction to the practice of peer review.

My hope is that you will receive insights, a list of key words, and an article that are all useful to you as you begin the classical argument paper. But it would be even cooler if you identify other students who are writing on similar topics and keep up the collaboration! The same articles show up over and over in student papers, and that’s not a problem at all! The student essays still turn out unique because each student has their own focus. So I encourage you to keep sharing! If you find an amazing article and you know that someone else would also find it useful, send them the link! You can continue doing that here or in YellowDig.

Sources:

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.) What’s the difference between ‘sympathy’ and ’empathy’?https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sympathy-empathy-difference

Walker, M., & Tschanz, C. (2013). Stories are like water: Writing workshop for nurses. Creative Nursing, 19(2), 81-85. https://doi.org/10.1891/1078-4535.19.2.81

I will post article below.

Story Share-Solution

1. Thread

Thread Title: “Medication Administration Errors in Nursing”

Nurses strive for perfection, but the work environment is pressuring, and often nurses make mistakes that can jeopardize a patient’s safety and health outcomes. Most mistakes involving nurses at work are unintentional. Nonetheless, they can bear legal upshots if they lead to adverse events or a patient decides to push ahead with a lawsuit. Patient safety is an indicator of the quality of health and other significant aspects of protocol adherence (Mahrous, 2018). Nurses’ primary role is to ensure patients receive the needed care, promoting their health and well-being. In this case, nurses promote quality of care and patient safety by supporting patients in their recovery journey and after discharge. Throughout my career, I have been involved in several mistakes, some life-changing, particularly in the first years of practice. I will discuss a nursing mistake I was involved in during my clinical placement.(Medication Administration Errors in Nursing-Essay-Example)

2. Call Dibs

“Alarm Fatigue Is Real”

3. Read the Essay

“Alarm Fatigue Is Real”

4. Response to Essay

Plot

The essay is about alarm fatigue and its impact on care. The author discusses alarm fatigue in general, pointing out contributing factors, how it occurs, how nurses deal with alarms that constantly go off, and the potential impact on patient outcomes. The author then discusses a personal experience with alarm fatigue and how it affected the patient and clinical outcomes. Finally, the author provides lessons from this experience and recommends an improvement on the system because the current one is not as effective as intended, contributing to nursing burnout. The author recommends a system that would stop going off when the patient has achieved desired or within-normal vital signs and also recommends a better way to connect the patient to the monitor because the sticker approach leads to inaccurate readings and constant alarms when it falls off, especially when a patient is constantly moving, typical in pediatric care.(Medication Administration Errors in Nursing-Essay-Example)

Personal Feelings

Alarm fatigue is a patient safety issue because, in most cases, nurses switch off alarms constantly and sometimes fail to notice when the patient needs help. Also, the sticker falling off the patient leads to incorrect readings impacting clinical decisions. The author’s experience helps me understand the healthcare environment’s challenges and how environmental factors affect nursing practice, including providing quality and safe care. I feel that high exposure to medical alarms can be tiring and frustrating, leading to harm desensitization from missed alarms, meaning nurses might respond late, which can be detrimental to the patient. (Medication Administration Errors in Nursing-Essay-Example)

Purpose of Sharing

The author’s primary purpose is to discuss how alarm fatigue impacts nursing practice and patient outcomes. This experience seems significant to the author and a life-changing learning experience that majorly impacted future practice. In such a situation, the outcome can be a patient’s death, which new nurses can find difficulty dealing with. Therefore, sharing this patient encounter elaborates more on nursing responsibility and how factors can impact nurses’ effectiveness in deliberating the responsibility.(Medication Administration Errors in Nursing-Essay-Example)

Personal Experience that Connects with Author’s

I can relate to this experience because medical device alarms are also common at the workplace, and the frequency of the alarms determines nurses’ development of alarm fatigue. Frequent alarms are tiring and frustrating because more than half of the alarms are false, and you leave a current task to respond to a false one. In addition, it is a sensory overload that leads to desensitization because, in some instances, I have failed to respond immediately when I sense a false alarm. I understand this can be dangerous, but I can wait to see if another nurse is calling before moving in to help. Other nurses calling for assistance seems a more effective way of responding to an emergency because it is never a false alarm. (Medication Administration Errors in Nursing-Essay-Example)

Something from my Learning that may Interest the Author

Interestingly, alarm fatigue is well-documented and is recognized by the Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal as a patient safety issue. Patient deaths have been associated with alarm fatigue linked to missed alarms and delayed responses. However, there are strategies I can recommend to adopt at the healthcare organization to help address the problem, including alarm parameter customization and using adopting electrocardiogram electrode changes to minimize false alarms.

Theme to Explore

Alarm fatigue has been widely researched, but interventions to address the problem and promote patient safety need more research. I would be interested in exploring how AI and other contemporary technologies can help address the problem and replace the stickers, which often fall off, leading to false alarms. (Medication Administration Errors in Nursing-Essay-Example)

Keywords

1. Alarm fatigue*
2. Impact of alarm fatigue on patient safety*
3. Alarm fatigue best practices
4. Nurses’ perspectives on alarm fatigue*
5. Theoretical underpinnings of alarm fatigue
6. Hospital policy and procedure to decrease alarm fatigue
7. Do Research

Article selected:

Claudio, D., Deb, S., & Diegel, E. (2021). A Framework to Assess Alarm Fatigue Indicators in Critical Care Staff. Critical care explorations, 3(6), e0464. https://doi.org/10.1097/CCE.0000000000000464

6. Share the Article

Authors: Claudio et al.

Publication year: 2021

Article full title: A Framework to Assess Alarm Fatigue Indicators in Critical Care Staff

Functional Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8205220/

Database: PubMed Central

Justification: I selected the article because it assesses work-related and personality factors influencing providers’ experience with alarm fatigue. The article posits that individualities can impact behavior towards alarm fatigue and recommends alternative strategies like work rotation, shift reduction, and breaks to reduce alarm fatigue.(Medication Administration Errors in Nursing-Essay-Example)