Assignment - Nursing Informatics

Running head: NURSING INFORMATICS
NURSING INFORMATICS
Name of Student
Name of University
Author note

NURSING INFORMATICS1
As a registered nurse, I came across a patient in the intensive care unit. The name of
the name was Steven, age 35 years who came from an African American background but was
fluent in English although he spoke with a different accent. On nursing assessment, it was
found that the subject has severe weakness of both the upper limbs and one of the lower
limbs. In addition, the subject also presented with high blood pressure and tachycardia. He
had shortness of breath and extreme fatigue on activity and even at rest (Sternberg, 2018).
The x-rays of the chest did not show any abnormal chest or rather lung findings. This
confused me as a nurse as because I was not being able to clinically correlate the signs and
the symptoms to the pathophysiology and unable to make a nursing diagnosis as well and a
diverse set of medications was given to address the case that confused me further. On
examination, I found that the subject has speech issues along with dysphagia and he reported
sensations of burning and tingling which meant he had a sensory impairment as well. On
motor examinations, it was found that the reflexes in the patient are diminished that is the
subject has hypotonia but the patient did not have a history of stroke, that made me more
perplexed. He had urinary retention issues as well. With these diverse range of signs and
symptoms, it was very difficult to formulate a nursing plan and as because the subject was
unaware about the disease and I, who was attending the patient for the first time and most
importantly was attending this type of diversely manifested disease for the first time, the
nursing care that was about to be followed seemed very vague to me. Clinical reasoning,
critical thinking were the three areas where I, as a registered nurse was feeling the barriers
with and it is critical to note that these barriers extended a huge challenge to my clinical
decision making. All the senior nurses in the department had gone home for the day and I
could not consult with anybody regarding the same. I decided to check for the medical
diagnosis that has been made and it was written in the case file that the patient has been
diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome. As a registered working for about more than a year

NURSING INFORMATICS2
in the intensive care and working with the multidisciplinary teams – I had no idea about the
disease condition and I faced a knowledge gap issues in managing and care for this Guillain-
Barre syndrome case. I decided to access the electronic medical records to go through the
case thoroughly but before that I wanted to access the internet in the personal computer to
learn about this disease that I was completely unaware of. Moreover, the patient wanted to
know about the disease and so were the family of patient.
I turned on the computer and decided to understand the etiology and pathophysiology
of Guillain-Barre syndrome and which nursing management strategies should be most
effective for Steven in the hospital and the ways of transitioning the hospital care gradually to
home care with the gradual involvement of the family members into the patient centered-care
process. As for search strategy, I first opened PubMed and then typed the keywords ‘nursing
management’ ‘etiology’ ‘Guillain-Barre syndrome’ ‘nursing care’ ‘Guillain-Barre syndrome
nursing interventions’ ‘pathophysiology’ ‘patient centered care’ ‘family centered care’ and
used the PubMed electronic database to search for the articles. The electronic search for
disease and nursing information was determined for scholarly, peer reviewed articles that
were in English language and only the journals that were both scholarly and only published
the articles that are written in English language were chosen (Zhang et al., 2019). I filtered
the year section to ‘2015 –present’ section and the search returned the most recent scholarly
articles that were not more than five years old. The articles that have been cited by the most
authors should be read (Brajovic et al., 2018).
The articles that I searched for accurate, of high quality and was acceptable was
determined by the fact that the articles were all published in scholarly journals that promised
the quality. The fact that the articles were published in the scholarly journals and were cited
by various other scholarly articles made me accurate, valid and reliable as well ((Weinlander
& Mian, 2019). Almost all the articles relating to Guillain-Barre disease and the nursing took