The Urgency of Creating a Culture of Caring: Start with You!

With the high costs associated with staff turnover, creating a culture that cares for and about nurses could be the most significant recruitment tool for a health care organization. Professional coaching, both from a leadership and retention or "caring for the caregiver" perspective, can greatly enhance opportunities for improving resilience, reenergizing and reengaging leadership and staff, and breathing new life into your institution's culture. Healthy employees and healthy culture lead to a healthy bottom line.

Intuition: A Powerful Self-Care Tool for a Life that Thrives.

Most nurses have the capability to be highly intuitive beings. There are many techniques for nurturing and feeding our intuition. Listening to our inner voice, creating moments of real silence, disconnecting from devices, and getting adequate sleep can all help open the channels of intuition and inner knowing.

The Disease of 'Busyness'.

Busyness is anything but impressive, especially when coming from a leader. Sadly, busyness keeps nurse leaders from more worthwhile and important things in their lives, such as authentic, vulnerable relationships. Our collective busyness has become an offensive disease.

Planes, trains, and other interruptions: such is life!

Nurse leaders can spend a significant part of their careers traveling. Self-care and personal mindfulness need not suffer when we are away from home and our normal routine. Personal health plans can be adapted in practical ways to travel with you.

Self-care is a lifelong journey.

As the most influential catalysts for health care reform in America, the time for nurses to emulate wellness and prevention has never been more critical. By creating healthy habits for ourselves, we flourish as ambassadors of self-care for our patients, families, colleagues, and communities. By taking care of ourselves first, we bring positive energy and vitality to work that positively affects others and influences the overall landscape.

Wellpower: the foundation of innovation.

The financial and human costs of compassion fatigue and burnout can be devastating. In the haste to "get more done," are we hardwiring our caregivers for disaster? The lifestyle choices we make and the degree of self-care we practice are paramount to not only our individual quality and quantity of life and our immediate circle of influence but holds the profound potential to create quantum change within our health care system. For nurses, who are the most influential force for health care reform in America, the time to emulate wellness has never been more critical.

Solution structure of ectodomains of the insulin receptor family: the ectodomain of the type 1 insulin-like growth factor receptor displays asymmetry of ligand binding accompanied by limited conformational change.

The insulin receptor (IR) and the homologous Type 1 insulin-like growth factor receptor (IGF-1R) are cell-surface tyrosine kinase receptors that effect signaling within the respective pathways of glucose metabolism and normal human growth. While ligand binding to these receptors is assumed to result in a structural transition within the receptor ectodomain that then effects signal transduction across the cell membrane, little is known about the molecular detail of these events. Presented here are small-angle X-ray scattering data obtained from the IR and IGF-1R ectodomains in solution.

Structure of the insulin receptor ectodomain reveals a folded-over conformation.

The insulin receptor is a phylogenetically ancient tyrosine kinase receptor found in organisms as primitive as cnidarians and insects. In higher organisms it is essential for glucose homeostasis, whereas the closely related insulin-like growth factor receptor (IGF-1R) is involved in normal growth and development. The insulin receptor is expressed in two isoforms, IR-A and IR-B; the former also functions as a high-affinity receptor for IGF-II and is implicated, along with IGF-1R, in malignant transformation.

Commercial enzyme immunoassay adapted for the detection of antibodies to hepatitis C virus in dried blood spots.

Background: Dried blood spots (DBS) provide a convenient method for blood sample collection in many settings where the prevalence of infection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) is increasing. Consequently, HCV assays are required that produce reliable results using samples derived from DBS.

Objectives And Study Design: The optimum buffer for the elution of samples from DBS was selected and the performance of a commercial enzyme immunoassay (EIA) was evaluated using these DBS eluates and paired plasma samples.

Incidence immunoassay for distinguishing recent from established HIV-1 infection in therapy-naive populations.

Objective: To identify a specific marker of recent HIV-1 infection.

Design: The humoral immune response in individuals recently infected with HIV-1 was followed by analysing the antibody isotype-specific response generated to HIV-1 antigens in sequential samples collected during and following seroconversion.

Methods: Antibody isotype-specific HIV-1 Western blots were analysed to identify interactions indicative of recent HIV-1 infection.