Fostering collaborative learning and leadership through near-peer mentorship among undergraduate nursing students.

Background: Innovative teaching strategies in nursing education are essential with increasing enrollment. Collaborative learning and leadership (CLL) activities encourage near-peer learning through mentorship between senior-level and novice students while supporting teaching ratios in lab and clinical. In this study, senior nursing students' perceptions and performance during CLL activities were explored.

The development of an instrument to evaluate interprofessional student team competency.

Healthcare institutions, accreditation agencies for higher learning, and organizations such as the National Academy of Medicine in the United States, support interprofessional education (IPE) opportunities. However, incorporating IPE opportunities into academic settings remains difficult. One challenge is assessing IPE learning and practice outcomes, especially at the level of student performance to ensure graduates are "collaboration-ready".

The effect of increasing dairy calcium intake of adolescent girls on changes in body fat and weight.

Overweight is epidemic in adolescents and is a major concern because it tracks into adulthood. Evidence supports the efficacy of high-calcium, high-dairy diets in achieving healthy weight in adults. However, no randomized controlled trials of the effect of dairy food on weight and body fat in adolescents have been reported to our knowledge.

Combining service learning and research: partnering with schools.

Providing service and research experiences for nursing students is a challenge. The authors discuss a partnership with local parochial schools in which nursing students presented health information and collected data. Through this partnership, families and school personnel gained knowledge of health promotion behaviors, and nursing students were involved in a service-learning and research project.

Partnering with schools: a win-win experience.

In many states, budget cuts have influenced school systems to question whether school nurses are necessary. Consequently, many schools no longer have a nurse to coordinate school health services. Creighton University School of Nursing saw this situation as an opportunity.

Predictors of mortality following involuntary interinstitutional relocation.

Relocation is traumatic for older adults. There is a paucity of literature about the characteristics of individuals who are most susceptible to negative effects of relocation. Residents of a nursing home that closed were compared with residents of a control institution to determine whether relocation had a significant effect on mortality and to identify risk factors for death.