Completing the first draft of our synthesis paper and final assignments leading up to this has been a very smooth process working with Harrison. Both of us agreed that it wasn’t as time-consuming as we initially thought it would be to put together this draft. I can attribute this thought to the well-placed assignments that led up to this point, where I can see now all work together like puzzle pieces to give us the paper. When completing the evidence appraisal table, this allowed us to clearly lay out the major facts and pieces of information that we wanted to include in our synthesis. One thing that really stood out to me was that there was no clear answer in answering our PICOT question the way it was worded. This was based off of research that showed how infants that had a diet mostly of breast milk had lower fat mass only during a portion of the first year as compared to a diet mostly of cow’s milk formula having lower fat mass during the opposite time period in the twelve months. This makes me think that more research should done to have a mixture of diets and utilizing each during different months to have an overall low fat mass rather than the alternating lead in fat free mass. Also, another finding was that in one study that also included data about Soy Formula, that was the leader in fat-free mass as compared to the other two diets, this surprised me as I didn’t know this was an option for nutrition and more data should be completed among other alternatives. These findings will impact my future nursing practice as a hopeful labor and delivery nurse in supporting mother and parent’s decision for the diet of their child. I would advocate for breastfeeding for the beginning to aid in the mother-baby bond and then transition to using cow’s milk or soy formula. Yes, we both came to the same conclusions and I look forward to hearing his opinions on our findings.
Tag: EBP
From inquiry to discovery
Since my team chose a topic, we had to slightly alter our wording to further clarify details we indicated in our question. Our PICOT asks the question if infants that were fed a diet majorly of breastmilk as compared to a diet majorly of formula had differences in their growth and development. We had to clarify about a diet that mostly consisted of either breastmilk or formula milk, the wording could have wrongfully included babies who had a mixture of both types of milk when our goal was to compare the two diets and the effects of that. The research articles that were available to us in databases was slightly limited due to the time constriction of being from the past 7 years, there was a high amount of research that had this theme 8 or 9 years ago which had to be excluded. Also, making the searches specific to growth and development or body composition of infants with one diet versus another was limited, but we are confident that with the three articles chosen that they adequately cover our topic and provide information to support our PICOT question. One challenge that we had was the time constriction like previously mentioned, but once we found one meta-analysis it was used to go through the list of references to provide another good article to use. A success that our team has experienced is good teamwork and communication, after we were notified that one of our articles was not a research article we quickly worked together to run searches to fix that issue. This step has gone relatively smooth and I am looking forward to continuing the process.
