Innovative Approach to Address Disability Concepts and Standardized Patients With Disability in an Undergraduate Curriculum.

Background: Despite a growing population of people with disabilities (PWD), health care professionals, including nurses, receive little educational preparation to provide health care to them. To address this issue in nursing education, the faculty of a school of nursing designed and implemented an innovative teaching strategy that can be adopted by other nursing programs and faculty.

Method: A systematic plan was developed and implemented to integrate standardized patients with disabilities (SPWD) into an existing undergraduate nursing program.

Persons with Disability: Their Experiences as Standardized Patients in an Undergraduate Nursing Program.

This descriptive qualitative study examined experiences of standardized patients with disabilities (SPWDs) in an undergraduate nursing program through focus group and telephone interviews. Content analysis identified five themes: 1) desire to improve care for others, 2) opportunity to be productive again, 3) joy in seeing students learn, 4) desire for more feedback on performance, and 5) importance of having SPWDs assess accessibility of the facility. SPWDs participated to improve sensitivity of students to disability and appreciated having a voice in educating future nurses.

Are all children equal? An analysis of the predictive value of selected pediatric characteristics of the referral of children to pediatric home health services.

Issues And Purpose: To examine the predictive value of selected pediatric characteristics of the referral of children to pediatric home health services (PHHS). No empirical studies to date have evaluated the criteria used to determine the need for PHHS or if disparities in the referral of children to PHHS occur.

Design And Methods: Randomly selected hospital records of 557 children discharged from one pediatric hospital between October 1999 and September 2000 were examined.