• OUTLINE
  • Advocacy in Nursing
    • Patient advocacy
      • information
      • support (emotionally and information wise)
      • risky treatment
    • Advocating for yourself and your unit
      • short staff
      • shift time
      • time off
• WRITE OUT

Hi everyone. I’m Alyssa Catalan and I am a nursing major here at USF. I was really struggling to find a speech topic that related to advocacy, until we started to talk about advocacy in my Intro to Professional Nursing class. That class gave me an idea and I’ll be sharing some of that with you all today. So I’ll be talking about advocacy in the nursing profession, more importantly advocating for your patient and yourself.

Patient advocacy is when you advocate for your patient and giving them the care they need. This could be by giving them information about their diagnosis and how to deal with it or listening to your patients concerns and addressing them. For example, if you have a patient who has been recently diagnosed with a terrible disease, they might not know about the disease or how it will affect their life. So it’s your job to give them the information and support they need, as well as listen to their concerns. Another example of advocating for your patient could be when they want to go through with a risky treatment plan that their family or other care providers don’t really agree with. It would be your job as a nurse to kind of convince everyone that that it what your patient wants and help them fight for the care they want and deserve.

As well as advocating for their patients, nurses also have to advocate for themselves. This means speaking up for the things that affects you as nurse or your unit. For example if you’re working overtime almost everyday because your unit is short staffed, it’s beneficial to you and your unit to speak up and get your supervisor to schedule more people. This could benefit you as an individual, your unit as a whole, and your patients because there would be more people on hand to care for them. Advocating for yourself could also be fighting for the shift that you want, whether it be the morning, midday, or night shift.

And yeah, thank you for listening to me talking about advocacy in the nursing profession.

• SOURCES

Introduction to Professional Nursing Class

One thing I feel like I did well was having good visuals behind me so it gave something for the audience to look at while I was talking. However, something I would have liked to have done better was the actual delivery of my speech. I do not feel like I got what I wanted to say across clearly because I froze up there and could barely focus on the notes on my paper. Because of this, I feel like my delivery was very jumbled and unorganized. I also feel like my speech was incredibly short which made it seem like I did not work on it enough or gather enough information.

In the future I think it would be a good idea to practice my speech more than I did this time around so that it comes through more organized. I will keep using visual aids for my speech because I feel that helps me stay as on track as I possible can.

• OUTLINE

• WRITE OUT

Hi everyone. As you already know my name is Alyssa Catalan and today I am going to be talking to you guys about rail bikes.

Some of you might be wondering “What exactly is a rail bike?” Well, a rail bike is basically a bike with added parts that helps it to sit on the rails of a railroad track. It could also be a little cart on railroad tracks with pedals on it. So basically how it works is that you have to use the pedals to move the bike along the rails.

You have to go on one of those rail bike “tours” to use one. These places usually send people off on these rail bikes at specific times of the day, each with 200 feet in front of them and behind them. Giving 200 feet of space in either direction ensures that no one is going to bump into you or you don’t bump into anyone, meaning you can really go at your own pace and freely enjoy the scenery around you. So it’s basically a “guided tour” and by “guided” I mean that the rails guide you.

Basically anyone can go out and use a rail bike. if they wanted to. Young people, old people, blind people, and even people who do not know how to ride a bike. Like me. Why is this? Well, because you don’t really have to balance yourself on a rail bike, it does all that for you. All you have to do is pedal the bike and it moves. This is great for blind people because they get to feel how it is to pedal a bike, but they do not have to worry about bumping into anything or balancing themselves.

Where can you use or rent a rail bike? I think the closest one from here is in Oregon. (ocrailriders.com) There’s also a bunch on the east coast apparently, like around Rhode Island area. You can check that at railexplorers.net. I think rail bikes are kind of a big thing in South Korea, because when I was looking for information I saw a lot of pictures and videos of rail bikes from there. So yeah.

SOURCES

RAIL BIKES IN KOREA.

Rehearsal #2

Rehearsal #1