Assignment Scenario
After graduating from nursing school and passing your boards, you accepted a position as an RN in the emergency center at Rasmussen General Hospital (RGH). In the weeks ahead, your emergency center plans to implement a new initiative where clients diagnosed with low-risk deep vein thrombosis (DVT) will be sent home on 3 months of oral anticoagulation therapy with rivaroxaban.
Historically, clients diagnosed with DVTs in the emergency center were admitted to the hospital’s observation unit. However, when surveyed about their experiences, many clients reported that this was costly, time-consuming, and inconvenient. Under RGH’s new program, emergency center nurses will be responsible for educating clients about their new medication and administering the first dose to the client before discharge.
As part of this new initiative, all emergency center nurses at RGH must be trained to properly educate these clients on all aspects of their new medication regimen. Because you have demonstrated a keen interest in pharmacology, your manager has asked you to develop the educational tools that will be used to train the nurses at RGH.
It’s worth noting that the standard dosing for all low-risk DVTs is as follows:
- 15 mg BID, 12 hours apart, for 21 days
- After 21 days, use 20 mg once per day
- After 90 days, the client will follow up in the thrombosis clinic to evaluate if they meet criteria for discontinuing the medication
Assignment Instructions
Your manager explained that all of the emergency center nurses at RGH will be educated in small groups through a short, in-service training session. You have been asked to develop a professional-looking PowerPoint presentation that the trainers will use to guide the in-service sessions. Your PowerPoint will need to:
- Be professional-looking, have a title slide, and 10-15 content slides.
- Use the Speaker Notes feature in PowerPoint to reduce the amount of text that appears on the content slides.
- The Speaker Notes for each slide will contain the text that will guide what the trainer will say while presenting the slides during the in-service.
- The content slides themselves should be clear and easy to understand; they serve as an outline so the audience can follow along with what is being presented.
- Be written using proper spelling/grammar and at a level that would be appropriate for the audience.
- Remember the purpose of the training is to help nurses learn to educate their clients about the use of a medication. With that in mind, it may be helpful to provide examples of how to explain the information to a client in an easy to understand way without complicated, technical terms.
- Include APA formatted in-text citations for at least 3 scholarly references and present the sources in APA format on a References slide.
- Contain content addressing the items below.
- Pharmacotherapeutics
- State the drug name and its therapeutic category.
- Pharmacodynamics – how does this drug work to achieve its intended response?
- Pharmacokinetics – how is this drug absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted?
- Discuss dosage, scheduling, route, and length of therapy.
- Describe what clients can expect regarding their therapeutic response and when it should develop.
- Introduce nondrug measures that clients can do to enhance their therapeutic response (e.g., specific diet to follow, exercise requirements, substances to avoid, special precautions to take, etc.).
- Side Effects, Adverse Effects, and Interactions
- Explain the symptoms of common side effects, and what clients can do to minimize any discomfort.
- Explain the symptoms of any major adverse effects, and what clients should do if they experience them.
- List the major adverse drug-drug interactions and drug-food interactions that clients need to be made aware of.
- Follow-up Care
- Provide information regarding when clients should call their doctor for advice (e.g., questions, non-urgent symptoms, unpleasant side effects, etc.).
- Emphasize any symptoms for which clients should seek immediate care (e.g., when to go to the emergency center or call 911).
Note: When developing a professional-looking presentation, it’s important to be mindful of how you layout your content. The slides should present key points, arranged in a logical manner, without extraneous information contributing to a cluttered look. Using the Speaker Notes feature in PowerPoint is a great way to include relevant details without overloading the slides.
