The Challenges of Advance Care Planning for Acute Care Registered Nurses.

Study Background: The practice of acute care nurses is shaped by organizational factors such as lack of privacy, heavy workloads, unclear roles, lack of time, and lack of specific policies and procedures. We know little about the social and organizational structures and processes that influence nurses' uptake of valuable patient-centered discussions like advance care planning (ACP). ACP is beneficial for patients, their substitute decision makers, and healthcare providers.

Evaluating an Initiative to Promote Entry-Level Competence in Palliative and End-of-Life Care for Registered Nurses in Canada.

Numerous competency statements have been developed for the purpose of guiding nurse educators and clinicians. Rarely, though, are there evaluations of the use of these competency statements in practice. In this cross-sectional descriptive study, nurse educators were surveyed to determine how the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN) Palliative and End-of-Life Care Entry-to-Practice Competencies and Indicators are used in schools of nursing in Canada.

A description of a process to calibrate the Morse fall scale in a long-term care home.

The purpose of this article is to describe the process of calibrating the Morse Fall Scale in a Canadian long-term care home as one aspect of a complex fall prevention program. The authors propose that the implementation of a calibration process of a fall risk assessment tool enables care providers to identify residents at greatest risk for falling. The authors further suggest that the ability to identify those residents most likely to experience a fall facilitates tailoring of fall prevention strategies for these individuals at greatest risk.