Module 3 blog

I chose two electronic indexes: PubMed and CINAHL. Once you do the tutorial for them, they are very user-friendly. It is helpful to use the 'advanced search' to quickly decrease your results from thousands to just a handful of very specific articles. For evidence-based practice, this is probably the fastest and easiest way to come up with exactly what you need for research and literature reviews. You can also list articles by most recent first, which is a great way of simplifying the search as well. I found all the articles I needed for my topic, which was nurse practitioner education (related to preceptors and preceptorship).

Next, I used the guideline index to look up a different topic, because the National Guideline Clearinghouse is more specific to diseases and treatments or interventions than it is to education for NP's. I chose NMS (neuroleptic malignant syndrome) because I had a patient last week who had experienced this life-threatening and life-altering condition. Unfortunately, after several searches including an advanced search, I was unable to find treatments/ interventions. It does, however, have information about many different medical conditions and 'grades' interventions based on evidence-based research.

Finally, I did a basic Google search on my original topic of nurse practitioner education relating to preceptorship. I found one interesting article, but it was not research or evidence-based information. Most of what I found were websites of online nursing schools. While Google can lead you to Wikipedia, which offers a lot of basic information on just about any topic, this information is not necessarily evidence-based. It can, however, lead you to other websites that have more information on your topic. The caveat is that it may be difficult to determine if the information you find is from a reliable source.