Cllinical Skils in haematology and bone marrow transplantion Nursing Module - Essay Example

Although blood transfusion is an apparently acceptable treatment, this is not the final therapy for many types of anaemias, and they would need definitive therapies for those clinical indications. As a nurse, engaged in the care of such patients, work in this area needs considerable specialized clinical skills which are based on specific knowledge in this area. In this work, I will discuss the care of a patient with aplastic anaemia and explore the requisite clinical skills for such a patient on the basis of existing and current knowledge and also seek to examine the rationale of investigations, management, and nursing plans of such a patient from those perspectives and to investigate the alternative treatments in a patient with aplastic anaemia that I was assigned care of (Young, NS., 2002). Normal Erythropoiesis: Hematopoiesis is the process by which the formed elements of the blood or the cells in the blood are produced.

The process is regulated through a series of steps beginning with the pluripotent hematopoietic stem cell. Stem cells are capable of producing red cells, all classes of granulocytes, monocytes, platelets, and the cells of the immune system. Commitment of the stem cell to the specific cell lineages appears not to be regulated by known exogenous growth factors or cytokines (Choi, JW., 2006). Rather, stem cells develop into differentiated cell types through incompletely defined molecular events that are intrinsic to the stem cell itself.

Following differentiation, hematopoietic progenitor and precursor cells come increasingly under the regulatory influence of growth factors and hormones. For red cell production, erythropoietin (EPO) is the regulatory hormone. EPO is required for the maintenance of committed erythroid progenitor cells that, in the absence of the hormone, undergo programmed cell death. The regulated process of red cell production is