Respond to DQ#1

Respond to your colleagues’ posts by sharing your thoughts on their specialty, supporting their choice or offering suggestions if they have yet to choose. 

 At least 2 references in each peer responses! 

The scenario is about the ‘Opioid Abuse/crisis in the U.S. healthcare system. The crisis is aggravated by the misuse of and the addiction to opioids that includes prescription to pain relievers, synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, and heroin (National Institute on Drug Abuse., 2020). It is a serious national crisis that has gone out of proportion affecting the public health, in addition to social and economic welfare.  

The data that could be used in such a scenario are enormously, for example, data on deaths as a result to opioids overdosing; data on the misuse of and the addiction to opioids; data on the burden to public health; data on the prescription rates; data on the patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain that misuse them; and data on the opioid overdoses across cities in the U.S. The above mentioned data can be collected and accessed through the different hospital databases across the country on the opioids prescription and recorded deaths due to opioids overdoses; data on the sales of illicit opioid; and check data on opioid overdose publications. The types of additional secondary data sources include National surveys; the HER and claims data sources; national, state or local data sources; prescription drug monitoring data sources; and mortality record data sources (Stein et al., 2018).

A broad range of knowledge can be derived from the above data. For example, data on the prescribed opioids for chronic pain and the possible cases of misuse; patients that have developed opioid use disorder; number of people that use illegal opioids and die as a result of this; percentage of people that use opioids and misuse them leading to addiction; increases in opioid increases; and opioid overdoses by city and related trends, among others. 

Nurse leaders can use clinical reasoning and judgment in the formation of knowledge from the presented experience. In the case of clinical reasoning, a nurse leader can rely on the technological-based and scientific knowledge to discern the relevance/significance of the provided data and how it applies to particular patients suffering from the experience. In doing so, clinical leaders can easily consider the clinical trajectory of affected patients, sensitivities to care interventions when forming clinical decisions, and patients concerns and preferences. On the other hand, clinical judgment can be very significant since it will enable nurse leaders to arrive at appropriate nursing diagnosis, clinical decision-making, and health promotion (Seidi et al., 2015). It could be beneficial especially when dealing with the prescription and overdose-related issues. _