On a busy day in the emergency department, it is natural to fall back on old practices that are inefficient or not based on the latest evidence because they are familiar. For many nurses, keeping up with the latest guidelines or recommended best practices is challenging while balancing their day-to-day clinical obligations.
At a time when many organizations are struggling with the nursing workforce shortage, every moment of a nurse’s shift takes on a heightened significance. Identifying and following updated evidence-based practices helps patients and improves resource allocation within the ED.
WellNow Nurse Practitioner Teresa Dodge, DNP, FNP, will lead the session “More Things We Do for No Reason in the ED” from 6:30-7 p.m. Pacific time on Sept. 21 at Emergency Nursing 2023 to help nurses eliminate outdated practices that waste time in the ED.
Dodge will share the latest data with her audience to challenge their potentially obsolete approaches to day-to-day challenges and instill self-awareness around the procedures that could improve providers’ effectiveness through relatively minor changes.
“Everywhere you go, you notice that each ED has their own way of doing things,” she explained. “Sometimes guidelines get updated, and we’re not good at adopting them because we’re stuck in our old ways of thinking.”
She hosted a similar session at Emergency Nursing 2022 in Denver. Due to the enthusiastic reception of the topic last year, she created a new presentation to identify additional everyday practices in the ED that are or are not supported by an evidence-based framework.
This year, Dodge will examine practices related to chest X-rays for patients with asthma exacerbation, interpretation of contrast-induced acute kidney injury in CT imaging, and the best treatment for croup, along with other possibly outdated care methods.
“I hope that people leave the presentation inspired to question their own practices in the ED and think about the things they do that could be optimized with a different, evidence-based approach,” she said.