Nursing

Clinical evaluation of student nurses has long been an area of concern for nurse educators. It can be defined as the process of assessing the student’s progress in all educational experiences outside the formal classroom situation. It refers to the student’s ability to provide safe, competent nursing care under supervision to provide safe competent nursing care under supervision to its clients. Clinical evaluation is one of the most widely discussed topics at seminars and in the nursing literature today., Copyright is retained by the author. Please contact Susan Kalkhof Vitron for further use of this material.

Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Elaine M. Resler for further use of this material.

Pamela Holsclaw noted that sympathy, compassion, and involvement are being recognized more and more as essential components of nursing care by those who see this care as an interpersonal process. Since people risk emotional hurt in any interpersonal relationship, nurses are always vulnerable in the nurse-client relationship. Our culture views health professionals as a symbol of cure, restorers of health, and healers of disease. The potential for cure or complete restoration of health is limited with clients in intensive care units (ICU), coronary care units (CCU), and rehabilitation centers; therefore, health professionals view clients in ICU, CCU, and rehabilitation centers as a threat to this perceived self-concept as symbols of cure. This threat results in stress for the nurse., Copyrights are retained by the author.

The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of depression as it may relate to patients' behavior following coronary artery bypass surgery. Based upon research findings, nursing interventions may be able to moderate the incidence of depression after surgery. Depression can be caused by a change in life style, realization of mortality, and financial loss. Since the bypass surgery patient must significantly alter his life style if he is to maintain patency of the grafts and progress through rehabilitation, his chances of developing depression are high. Nurses are in the position to assist the patient to make successful changes and deter depression, hopelessness, helplessness, and anxiety. A nurse*s personal contact may help to clarify the patient's awareness of post-operative recovery. Providing information and assisting in the development of effective coping strategies may prevent the effects of depression. Such interventions are a part of the role of the cardiac nurse., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Katherine Gustafson for further use of this material.

Documentation is an integral aspect of nursing. "Professional nursing documentation fosters respect and recognition for the professional nurse." It has an impact upon nursing and the health care delivery system in the areas of quality patient care, legalities, and financial reimbursement. Quality care cannot occur unless there is precise and current documentation in the patient record. This ensures that continuity of care can take place as the patient’s health status is accurately communicated from one health care professional to another., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Barbara Arvanitopulos for further use of this material.

Copyright is retained by the author. Please contact Kathleen Berlin for further use of this material.

Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Arlene Polaski for further use of this material.

Copyright is retained by the author. Please contact Joyce Boxer for further use of this material.

The problems of inflationary costs of health care are not new to analysts of this phenomenon, and have been addressed in the literature for some time. As the problem is not new, neither is its development. Health care costs have been escalating for decades and the historical evolution can be traced to the post World War II era. At that time federal legislation encouraged dollars to be directed toward the expanding technological industry of health care and little thought was given to cost containment. This also proved to be true of the later Medicare/Medicaid legislation and large third party payers such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield. With the responsibility of out-of-pocket payment taken away from the consumer and assumed by third party payers, the individual gradually lost track of the actual cost of health care. The final bill for treatment has become of little consequence to consumers as well as institutions because someone else is picking up the tab., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Kimberly Windsor for further use of this material.

There is a widespread movement toward professionalization in nursing characterized by efforts to attain autonomy and to convince the public of the special needs which may be met by nurses. Nursing has had difficulty in becoming an autonomous profession through credentialing and the use of standards but they have not historically sought autonomy. While being legally responsible for their nursing practice, nurses rarely bear the direct consequences for the lack of appropriate decision-making. However, new role concepts have emerged and training and educational practices are changing. Nurses tend to see themselves now as being more independent, more than just an adjunct of the physician, and more as the extension of the client. Most physicians are male and most nurses are female, and thus, the traditional acquiescence of women to men compounds the tendency of professional dominance to exercise control of nursing practice., Copyrights are retained by the author.

Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Marie Palmquist for further use of this material.

Legionnaire’s Disease (LD) is an acute pneumonia caused by the bacterium Legionella pneumophila. Undiagnosed LD can be particularly severe since Legionella infections generally do not respond to the antibiotics used to treat most pneumonias. Patients on immunosuppresive therapy are at an increased risk to develop potentially life-threatening infections. At our institution Legionnaire’s Disease was diagnosed in three oncology patients and was associated with a contaminated hot water system. It was found that the hand-held showers in patient rooms were heavily colonized with Legionella and environmental eradication procedures greatly reduced the colonization of Legionella within the hot water system. Clinical awareness of Legionella as a potential cause of nosocomial pneumonia is necessary to rapidly diagnose and treat future outbreaks of LD., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact James F. Annett for further use of this material.

Copyright is retained by the author. Please contact Edith Snell for further use of this material.

The American Nurses Association (ANA) published their position on Education for Nursing in 1965. This paper defined professional nursing and technical nursing as the two levels of nursing. The minimal educational preparation for professional nursing should be the bachelors degree in nursing. An associate degree in nursing should be the minimal requirement for the practice of technical nursing. The position paper advocated phasing out diploma education for registered nurses. It acknowledged practical nursing as a growing occupational trend and proposed replacing programs for practical nursing with programs for technical nursing., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Sheila Warner for further use of this material.

Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Susan Fisher for further use of this material.

Copyright is retained by the author. Please contact Ellen Pfadt for further use of this material.

This correlational study was done to determine if there is a relationship between a nurse educator's spiritual well-being and the emphasis he/she places on teaching about spiritual care. The design involved the development of a six point Likert scale questionnaire which assessed specific educational activities pertaining to spiritual care. Another six point Likert scale, The Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWB) by Ellison and Paloutzian (1982), was utilized to assess spiritual well-being. These two questionnaires were sent to 136 nurse educators from five universities in New York and Pennsylvania. The hypothesis was that there is a significant relationship between nurse educator's scores on the SWB Scale and their scores on the Educational Activities Assessment Tool. Pearson's correlation was used to assess the relationship between the scores from the two questionnaires. The correlation coefficient was 0.585 which was significant (t76=1.98, pc.05). The hypothesis was supported. The results of this study have implications for nurse educators and schools of nursing. It is important for educators to be aware of how their own personal biases and convictions might relate to their teaching behavior., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Nathan Everhart for further use of this material.

Problem solving as the basis for all nursing intervention is a recent development in professional nursing. Historically nursing has been a "hands on" occupation where the nurse provided care on the intuitive level. However as health care has increased technologically, nursing has been forced to develop a theoretical knowledgebase and become more sophisticated in its practice, the change in nursing from a practicing occupation to a practice discipline has placed the burden of accountability upon each practitioner. The image of the practice of nursing began to change in the 1950*s when the Brown Report was published. It focused attention on the appropriateness of the term professional when referring to nursing. Since then there has been an ongoing discussion about whether nursing exhibits the characteristics of a profession. Attempts have been made to define nursing functions in relation to professional activities with minimal success, and thus the debate about nursing as a profession continues., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Linda Benson for further use of this material.

Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Carol Goff for further use of this material.

The purpose of this study is to further understand social support as one of the psychosocial factors affecting diabetes adherence, and to look at this factor in relation to diabetes education programs. The other purpose of this study is to assist in the search for a meaningful, practical psychosocial assessment tool for diabetes programs., Copyright is retained by the author. Please contact Catherine Gutowski for further use of this material.

In nursing, two major socialization/resocialization processes have been described by researchers: first, the initial adult socialization period in which lay people are socialized into the nursing profession through a formal education process, and, secondly, the resocialization process that occurs as graduate nurses leave their formal educational programs and enter the work setting for the first time., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Mary Ann Lubiejewski for further use of this material.

Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Valerie Lynde for further use of this material.

This descriptive, non-experimental study was designed to examine the differences in the degree of professional socialization among nursing students at two academic levels. The object of this study was to measure the socialization to the professional nursing role amongst students in ADN and BSN nursing programs and provide nurse educators with pertinent information on which to build and advance nursing professionalism. The two groups of senior nursing students from two universities in Northwestern Pennsylvania and Southwestern New York formed the sample for the study. Stone's Health Care Professional Attitude Inventory as modified by Lawler was used to ascertain degree and differences of professional socialization in the two groups. The two groups of students, ADN (n = 19) and BSN (n = 44), were compared on the dimension of "professionalization." The data was analyzed by using an analysis of variance (F-test) for each of the six subscales of the tool. The results revealed an f-value of 5.68 which was significant at the .05 level for the 6th subscale which measures compassion. The data as analyzed revealed f-values which were not significant for any of the other subscales or the total score. The finding indicate that the level of professionalism exhibited by the BSN students was not significantly different from that of ADN students., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Marie Langdon for further use of this material.

There have been many changes in American society over the past decade which have greatly influenced traditional education in this country. Brown has identified the women’s liberation movement, unemployment, equal rights, equal opportunities for the handicapped, a decrease in the birth rate, and students' rights as the significant influences on traditional education. These factors have influenced individuals to cross barriers into nontraditional occupational fields and institutions of higher learning to recruit and enroll nontraditional students. Statistics show 500,000 women over the age of thirty-five were enrolled in college courses in 1970. Statistics for 1976 show 55 million men and women over the age of twenty-five come from nontraditional sources: the minorities, the older students, and students who are considered academic risks., Copyright is retained by the author. Please contact Sharon Shipton for further use of this material.