Oral Hygiene

There has been great interest given to oral hygiene as a main part of nursing work. Providing oral hygiene care to patients by nurses requires many guidelines which should be evidence based and prepared for the purpose of ensuring better patient outcomes and gives nurses an opportunity to work on a scientific basis based upon past clinical skills and experiences which are proved to be true and accurate. The current assignment will explain what is meant by evidence based practice as well as oral hygiene with presenting the nursing care intervention practices related to oral hygiene and how nurse role can be very important in helping patients have better oral hygiene.

Barker(2010) found that evidence based practice can be defined as getting evidence via research and theory information and using it for preparing care plans and making care decisions which are suitable for the patients each according to some considerations as patient's status, health condition and medical diagnosis. Oral hygiene is the cleanliness activities concerning the mouth area including tongue and teeth, it is practicing some examinations for mouth and teeth and cure any found diseases and kill germs and bacteria in order to make the patient enjoy oral health that affects the general health. .(Perrie et al 2011)

A nurse work in care intervention mainly depends on the condition and requirements of each patient. Nurses in their work are usually making decisions which should be evidence based in order not to cause dangerous effects that may harm the patients after that. All care interventions need nurses to follow an evidence based strategy that ensures having effective and excellent results, oral hygiene is a care practice which requires to be evidence based as being strengthened by past researches evidences. Caregivers answers to patients questions regarding oral hygiene must be evidence based and this is much important for nurses who have to be used to this in order to achieve the best care practice for patients which improves their condition. Nurses can get evidence via researches available and compare them to theories and choose the best practices which help in improving the situation of patients and lead them to have better outcomes. When nursing interventions are done without evidence basis, the work becomes random and perplexed with great possibility of error occurrence which exposes patients to dangers of harm and having retarded health condition. (Howlett et al 2014, 287)

Oral hygiene importance became necessary for all nurses to practice during care interventions because of some reasons as oral hygiene is the first step in nursing care so as it gives them a chance to provide care effectively. Another reason is the little place of interest that oral hygiene has in medical care field as bing proved by research  as oral hygiene needs more deep knowledge by nurses. (Melnyk and Fineout-Overholt 2005)  Also it is proved that the shortage in oral hygiene care leads the patient to unneeded extra problems in mouth area and in teeth in addition to the low psychological state the patient suffers when being neglected regarding oral health. Patients may suffer dental problems, eating difficulties and respiratory problems to be added to the disease already existed. Nurses role which is basically help patients get rid of their pains includes helping them get better oral health so nurses should do the role she is responsible to by protecting the patient's mouth and teeth area via providing them with oral hygiene care which must be periodic, systematic, well organized and evidence based to help them have best well being.  (Sonde et al 2010)

I got my information via the internet and the sources provided me with the required material for completing the assignment such as websites, medical researches published in medical journals, I logged on google books which enabled me to look at some books previews and read reviews about the books but some pages can not be shown or downloaded which was as an obstacle to me when trying to get them. There were many other problems that I faced while preparing for my assignment such as being sure regarding the researches reliability which made me look at the researches carefully to choose the most reliable ones. Another obstacle I met in doing my work was the terms definitions and how this must be relevant to nursing practices as much as possible and also to be relevant to medical clinical care and to provide the required information. I faced a problem when trying to paraphrase the work which was finding sentences too complicated which made me sometimes translate them and underline the terms then rewriting them again in my words. Some medical dictionaries like the online medical dictionary helped me a lot.

The process of writing enabled me to gain good amount of knowledge and information about the topic of oral hygiene and how nurses can practice their role in care interventions related to oral hygiene. I already had some background about oral health yet the research I read and studied helped me increase my information about oral hygiene. This is in fact very useful for me as a nurse when practicing professional nursing work in oral health care. Oral hygiene importance lies in its role in helping the patient have a mouth free from problems with good scent which raises the patient psychological state and keep the mouth away from problems which hence improves the patient's general health.

In conclusion, nursing work includes many great roles to achieve during care interventions provided by nurses for patients specially the oral hygiene which is considered of the first nursing care steps as it ensures patients' protection from dental infections. Evidence based care is the type of care needed to be provided by nurses to help the decision making processes nurses do and to provide patients with accurate safe interventions got past excellent experienced benefits which leads a nurse to be successful in her work and also leads the medical organization to have a good ranked position among other health organization according to the patient satisfaction expressed everywhere.