NURS 6052 SEARCHING DATABASES
NURS 6052 SEARCHING DATABASES
The clinical issue of interest to me is mental health issues among adolescents due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This subject interested me because having worked as a Psych/behavioral health nurse for over 2 years, I witnessed firsthand how the number of adolescent patients increased at our hospital. I worked at a 20-bed inpatient behavioral health/psych facility and within a matter of months after COVID, we were getting twice as many adolescent admission packets than adult admissions. In six months, the hospital went from 20 adolescents to a 50-adolescent inpatient facility.
I started my search using the Walden library resource. I started with the broad subject of mental health. I narrowed my search result to adding adolescents to the search criteria. I selected “peer-reviewed articles” and changed the years to include searches between 2016 and 2022. I also included COVID-19 in the search criteria as well. This narrowed the search result down to 495 articles which is a lot more manageable to go through rather than going through thousands of articles.
I found a great article on this topic titled “The impact of COVID-19 on adolescents’ mental health.” In this article, the author discusses that several studies show that emergency department visits for peds patients increased after the first lockdown. The author also talks about the underlying causes of pandemic-induced distress, with social isolation and loneliness due to social distancing being the main culprit in increased anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation among this population.
I will continue to read through the list of articles on this subject matter and the COVID-19 timeframe of the last year will develop my PICOT question. I will also research how this pandemic over the last year has increased substance abuse among adolescents.
References
Malik, A. (2022). The impact of COVID-19 on adolescents’ mental health. Current Psychiatry, 21(8), e1–e2. https://doi.org/10.12788/cp.0275
