2024 Nursing Conference Grant Winning Essays
The questions for this year’s application cycle were as follows:
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Please describe how you will share what you learn at this conference with colleagues.
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How will you incorporate what you learn from this educational offering into your practice?
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How will this conference advance your long-term career goals (beyond the attainment of continuing education hour requirements)?
Essays were lightly edited for grammar, flow, and readability.
Emma Cropper
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Essay 1: I would take notes throughout the conference on paper - I would scan my raw notes into the system on my file share for my colleges to look at. I would also create resources (both for clinician learning and patient psychoeducation where appropriate) based on the topics that were discussed. I would print and laminate a master copy and display it up in the office notice board for people to look at when they walk past. Likewise, I upload them to the shared teams location and share them via the weekly team email to ensure staff knew to look out for the resources and read them. I would take a presentation slot in our weekly team meeting to present an overview of the topic discussed with brief bullet points on what was discussed. As part of this, I would ask if there are any particular topics the team would like me to discuss in further detail and use one of the teams designated CPD slots to present on a topic that they chose. If there is a want for other topics to be discussed, I could take two CPD slots or even provide 1:1 conversations/teaching if someone in the team has a particular interest in.
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Essay 2: I work in an eating disorders service. I would love to expand on my current knowledge base, in particular in understanding the experiences of young people who have been through services, so I can use this to improve the care of my patients, and take this back to my team to look at a service improvement project. I would also love to hear Dr Caz Nahman's talk on compulsive exercise and how to manage this part of treatment, such as when to reintroduce exercise and how to improve patient relationships with exercise ? this will be particularly useful as the majority of my caseload are boys who play sports at a competitive level. My background is physical health nursing, and I find learning about the physical health side of eating disorders fascinating, therefore I would use the skills learnt in the MEED talk to improve my assessment skills of young people?s physical health states, and learn how to piece together symptoms to a bigger picture - such as the signs of superior Mesenteric artery syndrome and more on the presentation of refeeding syndrome. My team has just lost the funding for our autism champion team, and the section on service improvement for autism and eating disorders who help fill some of my knowledge gap in this area, especially when we are about to lose such a valuable service.
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Essay 3: I have always had a particular interest in eating disorders, my dissertation was based on anorexia nervosa. I have no immediate intentions to leave the eating disorders service, but long term, my career goal is to work with children with complex health needs in the community. As part of this role, I may meet young people with ARFID - which is one of the topics being discussed in the conference - when working with this patient group. This knowledge would help me create a care plan that is specific to this presentation. Although it has a different underlying aetiology, I may also come across patients that are experiencing anorexia as a result of end-stage of disease in the palliative caseload. By having a more in-depth knowledge of the impact of malnutrition and the impact on the body, I can incorporate it into the care plan. Likewise, for patients who experience vomiting due to their illness/medication, I will be aware of the impact of the vomiting and incorporate minimising this into the care plans. Moreover, because the conference is focused on improving patient experience, I can carry on the patient & family centred ideology across any workplace that I go to and hold those values at the forefront of the care I provide. Finally, it would give me an opportunity to present to the team I work with, helping with my confidence in teaching and my public speaking.
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