Journal CE Assignment: Every Nurse Is an HIV Nurse (Case Study Sample)

Journal CE Assignment
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Journal CE Assignment
Nurses play a vital role in the healthcare setting. In the article “Every Nurse Is an HIV Nurse,” Bradley-Springer, Stevens and Webb (2010) point out that every nurse should take the responsibility of ensuring he or she is conversant with HIV. Primarily, this entails being well versed in preventing the disease, testing, caring, treating, and counseling HIV patients or those at risk of being infected. The primary reason for doing so is to ensure the provision of high-quality medical services to patients. Principally, this review provides a detailed summary and key points of HIV and nurses’ mandate as elaborated by Bradley-Springer, Stevens, and Webb.
The authors state that the HIV epidemic emerged globally in the late 1970’s, and since then, its methods of transmission have not changed. They are breastfeeding, sex with infected people, contact with blood, and perinatal exposure (Bradley-Springer et al., 2010). Despite the improvement of the health sector in the United States, it has been noted that the number of people not receiving care has increased from 42% to 59%. Primarily, this has elicited some advances such as the expansion of the number and types of medication used in anti-retroviral therapy, better treatment for HIV related diseases, and improved primary care services.
Further, as stated in the article, in 2006, CDC put forward some testing guidelines to reduce the number of people living with HIV but without knowledge of their condition (Bradley-Springer et al., 2010). Some of them were increasing HIV screening in patients, including pregnant women, fostering earlier detection of HIV infection, and counseling people with unrecognized HIV infection. Moreover, Bradley-Springer, et al. (2010) point out that one of the most fundamental ways to deal with the spread of HIV is to increase the accuracy and response time of the testing techniques. Notably, the strategies have advanced and have turned out to be reachable, speedier, and less obtrusive, making it simple to deal with HIV.
Currently, some of patients can be tested using urine apart from the traditional method of using blood. Rapid testing is a new method for testing that has played a vital role in streamlining the HIV diagnosis process (Johnson, 2013). Further, there are signs and symptoms which nurses should always consider to determine the HIV status of an individual. The common ones include fever, malaise, rash, loss of appetite, headache, night sweats, and myalgia. (Bradley-Springer et al., 2010). Apart from these, there are opportunistic diseases such as chronic herpes simplex, Kaposi sarcoma, and wasting syndrome which signify HIV. Recently, as argued in the article, there have been new developments regarding the antiretroviral therapy, as witnessed by the development of the two classes of drugs, and new regimens that have fundamentally boosted the treatment of HIV.
The currently available drug classes for antiretroviral therapy include nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors, integrase inhibitors, and entry inhibitors (Johnson, 2013). According to their research, the writers identified that monotherapy, which refers to the administration of a single dose, leads to the development of drug resistance and treatment failure (Bradley-Springer et al., 2010). CDC has conti...