Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay
For this assignment, you will complete a Aquifer case study based on the course objectives and weekly content. Aquifer cases emphasize core learning objectives for an evidence-based primary care curriculum. Throughout your nurse practitioner program, you will use the Aquifer case studies to promote the development of clinical reasoning through the use of ongoing assessment and diagnostic skills and to develop patient care plans that are grounded in the latest clinical guidelines and evidence-based practice.Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay
After you complete the Aquifer case study for the week, please print out the summary of your case session and submit as a PDF file to the Submissions Area. Note that the summary of your case session has your name in the top-right corner. You need to submit this document as evidence that you have completed the case.
The Aquifer assignments are highly interactive and a dynamic way to enhance your learning. Material from the Aquifer cases will be present in the weekly quizzes, the midterm exam, and the final exam. You must have all Aquifer assignments completed in order to successfully pass the course.Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay
Use this link for information on how to access and navigate Aquifer.
This week, complete the case entitled “Case #26: 55-year-old male with fatigue – Mr. Cunha.”
Submission Details:
Name your document SU_NSG6440_W6_Project1_Last Name_First Initial.pdf.
Submit your document to the Submissions Area by the due date assigned.Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
This qualitative study is one of the first to report on the impact of a comprehensive learner-centered PCMH curriculum administered in a third-year family medicine clerkship. The overwhelming positive responses of students to PCMH experiences diverge substantially from the literature documenting mixed faculty responses to PCMH transformation and far surpassed authors’ expectations.25 Findings from our study indicate that a core PCMH curriculum integrated into a third-year family medicine clerkship can impact medical students’ knowledge of and attitudes toward the PCMH. The core PCMH curriculum integrated into this FM clerkship is not duplicating other clerkship experiences but filling a gap in knowledge about and exposure to PCMH principles and practice. Qualitative analysis provided an in-depth look at student perceptions of PCMH experiences. Participation in innovative care models, such as group visits, home visits, and team-based care management, made a dramatic and positive impression on third-year medical students evaluated in this study. In their reflection essays, students described a mature understanding of the effect of the PCMH model on individual patient experiences; a majority of students also provided rich, unprompted reflections of the impact of the PCMH model on students, providers, and delivery systems. Observations of “system” changes in PCMH practices were most commonly reported, and students seemed genuinely impressed by the positive effect of the PCMH model in changing health care delivery.Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay
Based on these findings, we believe that exposure to a core PCMH curriculum in the third-year family medicine clerkship may provide a unique opportunity to reduce the well-studied decline in empathy and patient-centered attitudes among medical students as they progress through clinical years.26,27 Nearly 98% of references in this study documented “positive” reactions by students to PCMH activities. More than half of students in this qualitative study also described a positive change in their own self-assessed attitudes, knowledge, and skills as a result of participation in this PCMH curriculum. These findings indicate that our experiential curriculum was successful not only in encouraging students to learn about and to appreciate the PCMH model, but it also helped students to form favorable attitudes toward PCMH care during their family medicine clerkship. Encouraging students to participate in a comprehensive PCMH curriculum may be an important way to maintain student empathy and to appreciate the value of patient contentedness and whole-person orientation.Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay
There are several limitations to our study. One limitation of this study is the relatively short follow-up time at one institution. It would be interesting to see if the change in student self-assessed knowledge and attitudes persist beyond the 6-week family medicine clerkship by studying this cohort of students again in fourth year and if implementation of this curriculum at other institutions elicits similar impact. While students reported an increase in knowledge of PCMH concepts, pre/post knowledge was not formally assessed, another limitation of our study design. In addition, we intentionally chose to study student responses from reflective essays instead of hosting student focus groups or individual interviews to elicit as broad a range of student responses as possible. Therefore, it is possible that the Hawthorne effect may have played a role, with students tailoring their essays to please evaluators. Adding a required experiential PCMH curriculum as part of a third-year family medicine clerkship was highly successful in enhancing students’ self-assessed knowledge of and attitudes toward the PCMH model, a strategy which may better prepare a workforce primed to adopt changes in healthcare delivery.
Acknowledgments: This study was funded in part by grant number D56HP20783 from HRSA/HHS (Rabinowitz H, PI, 2010–2015). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the HRSA/HHS.
The authors acknowledge Dr Howard Rabinowitz for his careful review and input into this manuscript as well as for his role as principal investigator for the HRSA grant that has helped to fund this research.Evidence-Based Primary Care Curriculum Essay