One of the things Columbia is big on teaching us is 'evidenced based practice' which basically means that when we do things (like give a medication) we should be able to back up our actions with high quality research as opposed to just doing something because "that is how it has always been done". To ensure that our practice is evidence based we need to be able to reference reliable research - we need to know the difference between a randomized control trial and someone saying "4 out of 5 doctors agree". In order to help us out with this we had a class last semester called 'Assessing Clinical Evidence' and one of the assignments for that class was to perform a systematic review. Performing a systematic review involves picking a question and then combing through ALL of the research out there to determine the answer, and then determining if that answer is reliable or if better research is needed. The real world application of this being that if we have a question during our career we will know the correct way to go about answering it using appropriate sources (not google). The question my group chose to pursue was: "What is the morphine sparing effect of intravenous acetaminophen in orthopedic surgery patients?" I know you are probably on the edge of your seat waiting to hear all about our results but the cliff notes version was that it works! We, as anesthesia providers, should use it to help decrease the amount of opioids we give for pain control! IV Acetaminophen (basically Tylenol) has just been approved for use in the US by the FDA under the brand name Ofirmev (hence the title of this post) so this is a very hot topic in the Anesthesia world right now. So hot that we submitted our results to the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists and they asked us to present them, in poster form, at our national convention! Here is a picture of me by our poster:
The convention was held in Boston last week and we were excused from clinicals if we attended. Don't worry, it wasn't all business attire and lectures but my camera was out of commission after being dropped at
the Red Sox game so all I have are pics other people are posting on Facebook, here is one of me and some of my classmates enjoying some lobstah (said like a true Bostonian).
L to R: Eric, Paige, Billy, Emily
The convention was held in Boston last week and we were excused from clinicals if we attended. Don't worry, it wasn't all business attire and lectures but my camera was out of commission after being dropped at the Red Sox game so all I have are pics other people are posting on Facebook, here is one of me and some of my classmates enjoying some lobstah (said like a true Bostonian).
3 comments:
Oh my goodness. We have certainly come a long way since 3rd grade Science Fairs, but that board looks just as good as ours on cold vs. hot plants 16 years ago! Congrats on all your accomplishments :)
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I believe so. These are the original.
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