Community Health Outside the Exam Room: Extracurricular Learning to Augment Nurse Practitioner Student Practice Readiness.

Background: The curricular requirements of nurse practitioner (NP) programs are well established. NP students' clinical practicums provide a context for the extracurricular acquisition of administrative, operational, and systems-focused NP skills.

Problem: Acquisition of extracurricular NP skills is variable and highly dependent on a student's clinical placements.

Success Factors for and Barriers to Integration of Electronic Mental Health Screening in Primary Care.

Currently, only a third of primary care providers screen for substance use, which is a growing epidemic. This quality improvement study aimed to improve the screening process by integrating the Drug Abuse Screening Test without information systems support into the electronic health record to increase completed screenings and provider interventions for positive screenings in adult patients at an urban primary care clinic. Electronic drug abuse screening should include a prescreen followed by the Drug Abuse Screening Test, interprofessional approach, comprehensive education, and utilization of generic tools to create new screening forms.

No Room for Error: Reflections on My Sister.

An NP ponders the vulnerability of the seriously mentally ill.

Evaluating Diabetes Care for Patients With Serious Mental Illness Using the Chronic Care Model: A Pilot Study.

People with serious mental illness (SMI) have a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and shorter life span due to medical health problems. The chronic care model (CCM) has been used to improve care of patients with T2DM. One clinical organization that provided primary care to patients with SMI had excellent diabetes outcomes but did not have information on how they achieved those outcomes.