Outcome 5

Communicate, collaborate, and negotiate as a member and leader within interdisciplinary health care teams to improve patient health outcomes. 

Trying to remember a time when I had the opportunity to communicate, collaborate, and negotiate as a member and leader of the interdisciplinary team reminded me of the Research class when we researched a topic and reviewed the literature about that certain topic. I chose to research c-diff. At that time there were many cases of C-diff not only among the patients on the post surgical unit where I worked, but two staff members had also gotten C-diff.

I researched this topic for many, many hours and came up with some pretty interesting information. I worked with my manager and spoke with some of the physicians about the research I was doing in hopes they could share some of their expertise with me. After the paper was complete I gave a copy to one of the surgeons to see what he thought about it and I was surprised that he said there was information in my paper that he didn’t know and he would take that into consideration if he had another case of c-diff with his patients. I presented my paper to my clinical educator in hopes it would facilitate change within my unit. Because I was a charge nurse, I talked with the staff during our shift huddles about the information I discovered and encouraged them to follow the small changes outlined. 

Before I quit working on that unit we started to wear full PPE (we were probably supposed to anyway, but no one did) including shoe covers and everyone was better at watching the labs of suspected patients and getting the C. diff test sent sooner. Now that I don’t work there I’m not sure if things are still in place of if they have gone a different route. I plan to include this paper in my portfolio.



Clostridium Difficile Literature Review