Imagine you are going to the doctor for an annual check-up. No real problems have plagued you over the past year, except a few colds. However, the past few weeks you have been extremely tired. The doctor, being thorough, decides they want some blood work drawn. A day after getting the blood work the phone rings. The doctor wants you to have more blood work done because there has apparently been a mistake with you labs. After the blood work has been drawn the doctor calls you again, and this time you are told that you need to seek follow up with an oncologist because the blood work has revealed what appears to be leukemia. This news can be met with many different feelings. Initially shock and denial are at the forefront, and then followed by sadness or anger, fear, and then depression. Many oncology physicians and nurses are great when it comes to assessing lab work, and physical characteristics of the various cancers, the assessment of the patients psychological health though sometimes goes by the wayside. Many of these patients are excellent at masking there emotional distresses but that does not mean they aren’t there. It becomes essential that nurses become proficient in identifying the signs of depression and educate the patients that this is not rare occurrence and that they need to talk to their healthcare providers about their feelings.
A call to action is necessary to all oncology departments in Western Pennsylvania. After a sampling of 50 patients from various oncology treatment facilities, including, inpatient, outpatient, and physician office visits, only twenty percent of these patients had ever received an adequate evaluation of their mental stress. Depression is an extremely common problem with oncology patients. Unfortunately as stated in a literature review on this topic, “there are no agreed-upon methods on how to assess and classify depression either for research or clinical purposes”(Watson).
The Essay on Bleeding The Past Blood Doctor
Bleeding the past The Blood Doctor by Barbara Vine 400 pp, Viking There is something despicable about the genetics of haemophilia. Sufferers are male. Women carry the gene silently, realising their inheritance only when they give birth to an affected boy, who need not be their first son. By then they may have had daughters, some of whom will, in turn, pass the mutation to their children. Barbara ...
There are tools however that can be utilized to monitor the patients stress and mental well-being. The tools in question are the Beck Depression Inventory, The Health Promoting Lifestyle Survey, and the Coping Resources Inventory for Stress. A simple combination of the three of these tools could greatly aid in the proper recognition and treatment of depression. The incorporation of these assessment tools, would also help with the Healthy People 2020 initiative Health-Related Quality of Life and Well-Being. This initiative was implemented to promote physical, psychological, emotional and social health.
To implement this initiative the assessing must begin with the intake visit in the office. The intake or initial planning visit for treatment is the time in which the Lifestyle survey should be completed. The survey would give clues to the physician if the patient will have a stable support system and whether or not they will be able to care for themselves and be compliant with treatment. This will enable the physician and social workers to make necessary arrangements to promote healthy habits for the patient. The baseline assessments for the Coping Resources Inventory and Beck Depression Survey Inventory should also be performed at this time. Once treatment has been initialized it becomes the inpatient and outpatient nurses to continue the evaluations. If implemented correctly the stress/depression inventories would become a standard part of the daily or weekly assessment.
When I evaluate my own workplace for a possible implementation of these tools for our oncology population I see one major problem. When reviewing charts I have noticed that many of the daily assessments were done by basically copying the prior day’s assessment. The assessments we currently have in place, are a charting by exception assessment by body systems. My fear with making the assessment tools part of our daily assessment would be that one person would complete it appropriately and the others would just copy it to fulfill the charting requirements to avoid disciplinary action. Even though there is no proven depression assessment tool, these tools have shown to be reliable with patients that answer these inventories truthfully.
The Term Paper on Psychological Tests And Measurements: Beck Depression Inventory
This paper will analyze the facets of psychological tests and measurements by analyzing the Beck Depression Inventory. This analysis will examine two articles relating to the Beck Depression Inventory and will determine the uses, users, and settings of the measure. Beck Depression InventoryPsychological testing and measure has developed and progressed and is used in a wide variety of settings by a ...
To implement my action plan, I would use a basic personal in-service type setting. I would want to meet with a few nurses at a time, to ensure complete comprehension. Everyone wants to see statistics for implementing new policies or changing old ones. By presenting statistics on depression in oncology clients, I would hope to shock the staff into understanding the need for a standardized assessment tool for depression. This same presentation I would also present at the monthly nursing division meeting, where I would seek the approval of not only the staff nurses and managers but also administrators. Following the approval of the administrators I would then begin a committee of chart auditors to be sure the assessments are being done, and that they are correctly done. The auditors would also be responsible for collecting data on each patient from the assessments to determine efficacy of the tools. The goal would be to successfully implement the new assessment guidelines and observe a reduction in depression with behavior modification and prescription medications (if necessary), over the course of one year after implementation.
This action plan requires a lot of work, by all staff members that interact on a regular basis with this vulnerable population. No two oncology patients approach and deal with the diagnosis the same, and without an assessment guideline to go by it becomes difficult to identify coping. With the implementation of a standardized assessment tool, the different coping strategies of every patient can be identified and the individualization of treatment can be heightened even more.
The Essay on Formative Assessment 4
Assessment is regularly conducted by classroom teachers to determine whether students learn the lessons or have acquired the skills they have been taught. However, the prevailing concept of assessment is that it is given after lessons. It is also viewed as extra work that consumes time that would have been better spent in teaching. Some teachers do not even have the adequate knowledge as to how to ...
References
J. F. Carlson, “Review of the Beck Depression Inventory”©2010, The Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska and the Buros Center for Testing. J.E Hwang, “Reliability and Validity of The Health Enhancement Lifestyle Profile”. Occupation, Participation & Health ©2010 SLACK Incorporated K. B. Matheny, W. L. Curlette, D. W. Aycock, J. L. Pugh. “Coping Resources Inventory for Stress”, Mental Measurements Yearbook, Vol. 13. ©2010. New York, NY. E. Watson et al. “Depression Assessment and Classification in Palliative Cancer Patients”, ©2009, Pain and Palliation Research Group, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Healthy People 2020, healthypeople.gov
