Disability law and nursing education: an update.

Over the past decade, the courts have been called upon to apply the provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in several cases with implications for programs of nursing education. Courts have restricted who may be considered a qualified individual with disabilities. They have clarified the relative obligations of both students and educators in determining accommodations.

Nurse anesthesia students with disabilities: a legal and academic review of potential professional standards.

Establishing suitable and proper program admission criteria that protect both the rights of disabled applicants and professional needs to educate competent practitioners concern every nurse anesthesia educational program. Disabled Americans must be legally protected while ensuring that future nurse anesthetists meet expectations for professional competency To balance these demands, academic programs must establish criteria that define qualifying standards for practice. Such criteria serve the important function of providing notice to prospective applicants, as well as to established practitioners, about minimum professional competencies and behaviors.

Realigning the communication paradigm in nursing case management.

Communication underlies all of case management (CM), and better comprehension of the processes of communication within the context of the CM role may facilitate positive patient and organizational outcomes, and assist providers and policy makers in designing effective CM systems. Thus, the purpose of this qualitative, pilot project was to explore dimensions of communication of the nurse case manager role within a hospital setting. The results describe a "hub and spoke" model of communications and suggest the utility of this familiar model for understanding the communication dynamics for those who work as nursing case managers in hospital settings.

Hospital readmission from home health care before and after prospective payment.

Purpose: To describe and compare clients who were readmitted to the hospital during an episode of home health care, before and after the inception of the prospective payment system (PPS).

Design: A longitudinal mixed design was used to replicate a study conducted 9 years previously (pre-PPS) in the same home care agency in the central part of the United States.

Methods: Seventy-six closed-case medical records from a not-for-profit hospital-affiliated home care agency were retrospectively reviewed and compared to pre-PPS data.

Hospital readmission from a transitional care unit.

The purpose of this project was to characterize patients readmitted to the hospital during a stay in a transitional care unit (TCUT). Typically, readmitted patients were females, widowed, with 8 medical diagnoses, and taking 12 different medications. Readmission from the TCU occurred within 7 days as a result of a newly developed problem.