Patients presenting for surgical procedures must meet specific criteria in order to be deemed ready for surgery. Same-day surgical delays and cancellations often occur due to patients’ inability to follow preoperative instructions. The goal of this quality improvement project was to decrease the number of same-day surgical delay/cancellation occurrences due to patient nonadherence of preoperative instructions. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) Cycle was used in order to test an intervention on a smaller scale in order to determine if it leads to improvement. An evidence-based, standardized preoperative instruction pamphlet was developed and distributed to the patients across three specialties at an outpatient surgery center over a four-week time period. Surgical delay/cancellation occurrences decreased from 4.94% in the pre-intervention phase to 0.57% in the intervention phase. All same-day case cancellations during this project occurred due to patients’ nonadherence to preoperative instructions, more specifically, fasting guidelines. Evidence supports using a standardized, evidence-based, written pamphlet for delivery of preoperative instructions in successfully reducing same-day surgical cancellations. Further research is needed in preoperative instructions for patients speaking languages other than English as well as for patients who cannot read., Copyrights are retained by the author. Contact Lauren M. Hostetler for further use of this material.
subject
Nursing Preoperative education Preoperative care Medical appointments and schedules Ambulatory surgery
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.
subject
Nursing Pastoral medicine Holistic nursing Pastoral care Medicine
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.
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.
