Training School Counselors and Nurses to Enhance Collaboration Through Animal-Assisted Therapy.

Purpose/aims: The school nurse and school counselor serve an important role to foster student academic achievement, physical and mental health, and connectiveness. Each is paramount to student success; therefore, efforts should be made to further enhance collaborative efforts. Researchers sought to determine if an online training course centered on integrative methods would enhance collaboration between the school nurse and counselor.

Quality Improvement in Clinical Nutrition: Screening and Mealtime Protection for the Hospitalized Patient.

Purpose: The purpose of the quality improvement project was to (1) enhance awareness, accuracy, and use of the validated nutrition screening tool by the nurse and (2) improve compliance to the nutrition care plan that included increasing patient meal intake percentage.

Description Of The Project: Nurses were provided with an in-depth educational program focused on the implementation of the nutrition screening tool on patient admission to the clinical site. Second, a unit-level patient protected mealtime program was implemented in an effort to decrease unnecessary mealtime interruptions and promote nurses and nursing assistants to assist with meals during mealtime to improve patient meal intake percentage and, finally, to encourage collaboration between the clinical nurse specialist, unit level nurses, and registered dietitians to improve patient nutritional care.