Evidence-Based Nursing Practice

The goal of this TOC is to improve bedside manner in hospitals in Zambia with the ultimate goal of improving overall health through achieving this change. I first noticed this issue when I was shadowing at a hospital in Zambia is past summer. I was in the OB/GYN ward, and I regularly heard doctors and nurses telling women who were screaming in paint to “be quiet” or to “not disturb them when they were talking to the medical students.” I was shocked, because medicine is practiced very differently in the US. I took this problem to my homestay mom, to get her thoughts on the issue and she explained to me that many Zambians feel uneasy about visiting the doctor because they don’t feel like they are treated well, and many times they just feel like another number in …show more content…
Firstly, I assumed that patients are extremely unhappy with the way that doctors treat them. This may seem like an obvious assumption, but it is a risky assumption nonetheless because until the survey is completed, we will not know whether patients want their physicians to change the way they interact with them. There are important cultural and social factors to take into account with this assumption because this view of medicine and healthcare could very well be just how medicine is viewed in Zambia. These interactions could act as a window into the nature of particular professional interactions in Zambian culture. Until completing the survey, we may not even know if these interventions will be useful and/or are necessary. Other assumptions I made were that doctors and medical schools will be willing to be retrained and change their curriculum. This is a very large assumption to make because chances are, that doctors do not see anything wrong with the way they are practicing medicine and treating patients because their main goal is to successfully treat as many patients as possible, and therefore the interactions themselves are not as