Nursing presence: an existential exploration of the concept.

Nursing presence emerged in the nursing literature in the 1960s as a coherent and consistent philosophical term based in the existentialism of Gabriel Marcel and Martin Heidegger, and the religious philosophy of Martin Buber. Since the mid-1980s, however, the precision in definition has deteriorated and presence has accrued multiple meanings, resulting in a weakened sense of the concept. After delineating the etymological and philosophical foundations of nursing presence, the concept is defined.

Healing through integration: promoting wellness in cardiac rehabilitation.

This case study illustrates the basic life processes, transitions, and meanings of a woman with diagnosed coronary artery disease who participated in an innovative outpatient program of cardiac rehabilitation. Data gathering and analysis were accomplished using the phenomenologic procedures outlined by Spiegelberg and van Manen. A formulated structure, healing through integration, was generated from the interpretation of case study data, as well as the data of 15 other adult patients who participated in a program of outpatient cardiac rehabilitation.

Charting critical thinking: nursing judgments and patient outcomes.

Critical thinking involves analyzing data and making judgments about patient conditions, progress, and nursing interventions. Critical thinking forms the basis for quality documentation. As nurses' expertise in critical thinking grows, nurses can record how the unique considerations for each patient guided individual care and resulted in positive outcomes.

Bone growth after osteotomy and internal fixation in young rabbits.

The factors leading to overgrowth following fixation of long-bone fractures in children have never been clearly understood. The amount of trauma and the type of fixation may play a role. A rabbit model was used to investigate the influence of a femoral osteotomy and plate fixation on subsequent growth.

Do clinicians use diagnostic labels to direct intervention selection?

The authors report a descriptive, correlational study that evaluated the relationship between accuracy in selecting diagnostic labels and nursing interventions, and the relationship between accuracy in selecting outcome statements and nursing interventions. An instrument developed by the authors was used, based on previously published case studies. For two case studies, respondents (N = 17) were asked to indicate how important the nursing problem, the intervention, and the outcome statement would be in patient care.

A quantitative model for simultaneous brightness induction.

The brightness that results from stimulating a particular test-region of the retina may be depressed or enhanced by simultaneous stimulation of other "inducing"-regions. The test-region brightness may be affected by contiguous inducing-regions (local contrast effects), and by non-contiguous inducing regions (long-range effects sometimes called "assimilation"). We describe a computational model for early vision that can predict the results of brightness-matching procedures commonly used to measure these phenomena.

The social context of critical care clinical judgment.

Background: Clinical judgment in critical care is supported by a rich social network of care providers. The purpose of this study was to describe the social context in which the process of critical care clinical judgment occurs from the nurse's perspective.

Methods: An ethnographic study was conducted that included interviews with 10 nurses and participant observation in an open heart surgery unit with 59 nurses and two surgical teams during a 2-year period.

Evaluation of a problem-based access knowledge system using triangulation methods.

A microcomputer-based system designed to provide nurses and physicians access to expert synthesized knowledge in the area of pulmonary arterial waveform troubleshooting has been developed and implemented. Evaluation using triangulation methods show that there was a substantive increase in knowledge in both nurses and physicians.¿.

Context effects in visual pattern recognition by pigeons.

In the experiments described in this paper we examined the effects of contextual stimuli on pigeons' recognition of visual patterns. Experiment 1 showed a context-superiority effect. Specifically, two target forms that were identical except for location in the visual field were not discriminated when presented alone, but the compounds formed when each of these targets was placed between a nearby pair of flanking stimuli were readily discriminated.