Preparing clinical nurse leaders in a regional Australian teaching hospital.

The need to develop nurses as managers and leaders is crucial to the retention of registered nurses at a time of work force shortages and an increasingly aging work force in most Western industrialized countries. This article describes a creative and collaborative educational initiative developed at a large regional teaching hospital in New South Wales, Australia, designed to address this need. Based on a competency assessment process designed around face-to-face education, resource materials, and individualized mentoring from nurse unit managers, the aim of this multifaceted educational program is to develop effective team leaders in the clinical setting as well as a new generation of nursing leaders.

Clinical process redesign for unplanned arrivals in hospitals.

*Emergency department performance had been deteriorating in NSW Health facilities and at Flinders Medical Centre before a fundamentally new approach involving a redesign method, additional bed capacity and more rigorous hospital performance management was applied. *Redesign was undertaken in over 60 hospitals in New South Wales. *Numerous disconnections and misalignments in the process of care delivery have been uncovered during the diagnostic phase of this redesign.

The negative attitudes of nurses towards older patients in the acute hospital setting: a qualitative descriptive study.

Aim: This paper reports the findings of a sub-sample of interviews from a larger study designed to explore the attitudes of health care workers towards older people in that acute care setting. The discussion in this paper focuses only on interviews with nurses and their negative attitudes towards older people in their care.

Background: As Australia's ageing population continues to grow exponentially, their demand for hospital care also increases.

Towards innovation: the development of a person-centred model of care for older people in acute care.

That the population is ageing poses many challenges for health care planners. Some argue that these challenges, exacerbated by limited funding, maintaining increased community expectations and the need for quality health care outcomes, may be overcome by exploring alternate models of care. These ideas have led health planners to reconceptualise contemporary philosophies of care with the current emphasis on multidisciplinary teams and a person-centred approach to care.