Teaching in nursing

What sort of teaching is done in your nursing role? Is there any nursing role that does not involve teaching in some manner?

In my role as an RN, teaching generally occurs when we have precepting students. On occasion we might teach a fellow nurse about something, but generally everyone knows how to do what we do. We do have mandatory skills days (like last week) when fellow nurses and managers educate the department about topics including: anaphalaxis kits, defibrillator, and airway issues.

I think that if you are in a role that does not involve teaching then you are doing yourself and your environment a disservice. Teaching should be an ever-present theme that is always occurring in the background.

Sources of Information

The subject matter that I referenced was to try and find if there was a standard of care for the treatment of croup with oral steroids.

PubMed was a fantastic source full of evidenced-based guidelines and research that had been completed detailing dexamethasone versus prednisone. Understanding how to tailor searches takes time and practice, but once accomplished leads to great rewards of knowledge.

I used National Guideline Clearinghouse, but was unable to locate any guidelines on croup. I found this website somewhat frustrating as I tried to modify my search for better results.

Finally, Google (scholar) was able to provide me with many of the same articles available in PubMed, however when I tried to access the full copies of the articles, it required me to be a member of a website or pay a subscription.

So, in conclusion, I found PubMed to be the most worthwhile in terms of its content, searching capabilities, and access to full copies of the articles.