Hannah Osieczanek, the CON’s Student Ambassador for the traditional BS program, attended the 28th Annual Rocky Mountain Interprofessional Research & Evidence-Based Practice Symposium that took place April 14-15, 2016. Each year at the symposium, nurses and other health care professionals present research and evidence-based practice initiatives through seminars, speeches, and poster sessions in order to encourage research, scholarship, and relationships within clinical settings.

“Through this experience, my passion for research and evidence-based practice has grown,” Osieczanek says. “It was inspiring to be around so many professionals who have such a passion for improving patient care through research.”

Osieczanek and her partner Hemdeep Kaur were among such professionals and students as they presented their own research and poster at the symposium. They conducted their research on bed alarm fatigue at Denver Health Medical Center, where they monitored bed alarms for 16 hours. Osieczanek explains, “What we found is that all the bed alarms that were activated, besides one, were false alarms … set off by various interdisciplinary staff members. During the symposium when we were presenting our poster to other attendees we found that nearly everyone, from many different hospitals and units, could relate to this problem of false bed alarms leading to alarm fatigue.”

According to Osieczanek, this year’s symposium featured many other interesting and informative presentations. She cites the presentation by keynote speaker Andre duPlessis, MHA, FACHE, as the most inspiring to her. “He spoke about his experience as Chief Operating Officer at Tulane University Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. During his presentation, he walked us through before the storm hit land and then all the way through reopening the hospital nearly a year later.” She says the heroes duPlessis spoke of in his presentation will influence her as a nurse every day.

As a whole, Osieczanek says the symposium validated the importance of evidencebased practice for her. “With the implementation of EBP, it allows nursing care to stay parallel with the advancing technologies that are continuously changing in healthcare. [It] also encourages nurses to be lifelong learners because the evidence is always improving and increasing, which leads to better practices in the health Osieczanek care setting.” In her future as a registered nurse, she plans to be involved in research and evidence-based practice and she is already considering research to present at next year’s symposium.