Assessment Description
Academic engagement through active participation in instructional activities related to the course objectives is paramount to your success in this course and future courses. Through interaction with your instructor and classmates, you will explore the course material and be provided with the best opportunity for objective and competency mastery. To begin this class, review the course objectives for each Topic, and then answer the following questions as this will help guide your instructor for course instruction.
Which weekly objectives do you have prior knowledge of and to what extent?
Which weekly objectives do you have no prior knowledge of?
What course-related topics would you like to discuss with your instructor and classmates? What questions or concerns do you have about this course?
I have been an RN for almost 5 years and have acquired experience in different specialties such as telemetry, critical care, medical-surgical, and progressive care. My specialty mainly lies in acute care. That said, I have prior knowledge of several of the weekly objectives such as cardiovascular disorders, infectious disease processes, electrolyte and acid-base imbalances, pulmonary disorders, and dysfunction, as well GI, renal, and neurological issues. Gathering experience from working with different patient populations and pathophysiological processes has granted the foundation for the most common acute complications. I am looking forward to building on what I currently know and visualizing the pathways that will help further increase my knowledge of different clinical cases. Some of the weekly objectives that I have no prior knowledge of would probably be more of the cellular, genetic, and developmental disorders topics as it has been a while since I reviewed them. I also believe endocrine disorders are one of my weaker spots so I know I will be spending plenty of time reviewing those processes as well. I think it is incredible how we all bring different experiences and knowledge to the table being that we all have served in similar specialties. Discussing new cases as a class regarding up-and-coming topics such as genetic testing will be interesting as well. At this time, I do not have any major concerns about this course. I cannot wait to see what we all learn throughout the next 16 weeks as we study our way to becoming practitioners.
Critical care nursing has many subspecialties, and I have been fortunate enough to work with many populations. The pathophysiology I am most familiar with is cardiac, neurology, and neurotrauma. However, even specialized ICUs require consideration and care of the every-body system and an understanding of the interconnectedness of these systems. When reading through the course topics, most of the topics are familiar. I recognize that my clinical knowledge often focuses on acute care and perhaps rehabilitation. It is also important to acknowledge that the intensive care population does not represent other groups of people with the same chronic or acute conditions. In other words, critical nursing involves seeing patients at their worst pathophysiological states. This experience skews how critical care nurses see populations and perhaps shields them from how patients and practitioners manage these conditions outside the critical care setting.
This cohort has many students with different goals and paths. I look forward to discussing new and known information and gaining insight from our class.
I started as an RN on an inpatient neurology unit and currently work in a medical-surgical ICU that takes a variety of neurology patients. As such, I feel that I have fairly extensive knowledge of neurological pathophysiology. However, my knowledge is definitely more focused on acute disease and less on chronic neurological illnesses. I also take a variety of cardiac (surgical and medical) and pulmonary patients and therefore feel I have a decent knowledge of topic 3 (fluid balance, acid-base and hemodynamic disorders) as well as topics 8, 9 and 11- cardiovascular and pulmonary disorders.
I have fairly limited knowledge of genetic disorders and nutritional disorders. I have very limited knowledge of pediatric pathophysiology or reproductive disease. And while I have some knowledge of endocrine pathophysiology, this is one of the areas that I always seem to struggle with.
I am looking forward to delving into disease processes on a deeper level and developing a more thorough understanding of the illnesses that I see in my critically ill patients regularly. I am sure our class discussions will help apply what we are learning in our coursework to clinical situations. This is the first course I have taken in several years, so I am a little nervous about the time commitment and managing working full time while actively participating in this course (especially with time constraints for discussion board posts and responses). I am also a little concerned about the group projects since we likely all have very different schedules, but I am sure with good collaboration we will figure it out.
