Module 2, Question 1

The clinical issue I wanted to look up was incompetent cervix. Since I am teaching nursing student, I tend to use the CINAHL and ERIC databases, but I wanted more practice with Pubmed. I am a L/D nurse and have personal experience with this particular topic, so I thought it would be a good one to search on Pubmed. I also wanted to find out about the identification of the problem, since it seems that to be diagnosed, a woman has to go through at least 1-2 losses. I was wondering if there were any new ways of identifying the condition before a woman has to experience a loss.

So, at first, I tried the keywords, "incompetent cervix, treatment and identification." I got zero findings with that, so I took out the word "identification." I also added some limits and with that, I got 55 items. The search wasn't very time consuming at all. I think Pubmed makes it easy, but you just have to know how to use Boolean terms and also know what the common MeSH headings are. But even that isn't too tricky, because each citaion has a list of MeSH headings that were used for it, and if you just start using those words in your searches, it makes it a lot easier. For me, as a future instructor, I don't think there will be barriers to using this, I would just have to have access to a computer, which I'm sure I will. But maybe for practitioners, this wouldn't be the best way because you get too many items back, and it does take time to go through them.