Best Practices in Nursing

Practice-Specific Concepts

Within this report will be two major points of analysis and detail. The first shall be two practice-specific concepts that the author has identified and experienced through real-world personal experience. The second will be a set of five personal propositions or assumptions based on the same. These statements, assertions and propositions will be based in part on the personal opinion and perspective of the author of this report but there will also be support and information that was culled from the scholarly literature information base that exists in academia and the world. While there are many diverse and differing opinions out there regarding healthcare and how it should be done, there are some themes that ring true and through more than others and the realm of behavioral health is no different..

Analysis

Both of the practice-specific concepts that the author of this report will focus on are centered on the same basic concept…development. However, they are different enough, despite being related, that they deserve separate mention. Further, the scholarly source used for this report actually covers both of the concepts in question within the same scholarly work. The first of the two practice-specific concepts is simulation and practice. In terms of behavioral health, this would mean things like how to administer psychological testing, what questions to ask patients, what warning signs and phrases to look for and so forth. Most mental health patients are not suicidal. However, putting a "green" nurse, psychologist or other professional into a real situation without them first drilling and practicing what they will surely encounter when (not if) the time comes is a must. The related, but yet very different, concept in question for this report would be the assessments that are performed after a simulation or practice session is completed (Ballangrud, Persenius, Hedelin & Hall-Lord, 2014).

The study reviewed for this report, as offered and authored by Ballangrud et al. (2014), drills a little deeper by exploring how people rate themselves post-simulation. Even beyond that, they also cover how other people rate the aforementioned self-rater. To be sure, there needs to be some alignment and parity between the two or something is surely off. The person rating themselves needs to be honest and forthright about how well they did and they need to have the overall knowledge necessary to even know if they did well or not. Similarly, the people that rate others need to all be using the same general perspective and lens when measuring the person being assessed. They need to be fair, even-handed yet brutally honest to the extent that they do not sugar-coat or gloss over what went right, what went wrong and the particulars that inform both sets of details (Ballangrud, Persenius, Hedelin & Hall-Lord, 2014).

Both of the practice-centered concepts were selected because they revolve around teamwork. There needs to be a cohesion and "sameness" to the perspectives, practices, perceptions and way of doing things in a team. If there is not a continuity of sorts from person to person, this can lead to hurt feelings, inconsistent review practices, uneven patient outcomes, non-synchronized performance reviews and so on. There needs to be a "best practices" feel to everything done. It should be based on an evidence-based practice point-of-view, whether that evidence come from within the medical unit in question or from the scholarly sphere like the article used for this report. The linchpin and motivation that should drive all of this home is explained by Ballangrud and her colleagues when their offering says "effective teamwork has proven to be crucial for providing safe care." There are some medial arenas and specialties where this is true and more vital than others. The cited source for this report points to emergency care and cardiac care as being two sterling examples of areas where team cohesion, continuity and effective training is absolutely paramount but mental health care is certainly another one for similar yet different reasons (Ballangrud, Persenius, Hedelin & Hall-Lord, 2014).

With the above in mind, the author of this report would offer five general "mottos" or "credos" to go by when it comes to teamwork and cohesion in a nursing group or any other team of medical professionals:

Mental health is a very large part of the medical health community and practice right now and there are a lot of people that are under-diagnosed, not diagnosed or mis-diagnosed.