Is it time for a new category of nursing diagnosis?

Professional vigilance, the art of "watching out," is the essence of nursing. Vigilance is the mental process that makes the informed nursing actions of assessment, diagnosis, intervention, and evaluation possible and meaningful. Nursing vigilance must be described in our nursing terminology or it risks remaining invisible to others.

Development and evaluation of evidence-based nursing (EBN) filters and related databases.

Objectives: Difficulties encountered in the retrieval of evidence-based nursing (EBN) literature and recognition of terminology, research focus, and design differences between evidence-based medicine and nursing led to the realization that nursing needs its own filter strategies for evidence-based practice. This article describes the development and evaluation of filters that facilitate evidence-based nursing searches.

Methods: An inductive, multistep methodology was employed.

The development and testing of the PATCOA to assess pain in confused older adults.

The purposes of this study were to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of an instrument with nonverbal cues to assess pain in confused older adults, and to describe the differences among selected demographic variables and scores on the pain and confusion measures. The Pain Assessment Tool in Confused Older Adults (PATCOA) was evaluated with 116 cognitively intact older adults undergoing orthopedic surgery. The interrater reliability for each nonverbal cue ranged from 56.