Survey of Nursing Faculty Preparation for Teaching About Autism Spectrum Disorders.

The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has increased significantly in children and adults. Nursing faculty's ability to teach students about best practices in their care across the lifespan is important. This study explored nurse educators' perceived knowledge of, and levels of comfort in, their abilities to teach nursing students about nursing care of people with ASD.

Low-income, urban minority women's perceptions of self- and infant care during the postpartum period.

Objective: To describe low-income, urban, first-time mothers' perceptions about self-care and infant care during the first 6-months postpartum.

Design: Naturalistic approach.

Setting: Recruitment from community centers and churches.

Understanding access to care and health needs of Hispanic women from an urban community.

As a first step in a proposed program of community-based participatory research, this study investigated access to care and specific health needs in a population of Hispanic women from a medically underserved, urban community. There were 66 Hispanic women recruited at a local church to complete a 94-item researcher-developed survey. Thirty-two percent of women in the study were not U.

Preparing nurses to care for people with developmental disabilities: perspectives on integrating developmental disabilities concepts and experiences into nursing education.

The argument that nursing curricula have not adequately prepared graduates to provide appropriate care for individuals with intellectual disabilities and developmental disabilities (DDs) has been put forward for a decade or more. This is of concern because the number of individuals with DDs has been increasing at a rapid rate. Undergraduate and graduate nursing curricula should address concepts of care for DDs across the lifespan and develop strategies to provide students with clinically relevant experiences to support development of competencies for care of this population.

Conceptual, holistic, and pragmatic considerations for interviewing research participants.

Interviews are commonly used as data collection method in many types of studies. Interviewers and researchers may be challenged to take a holistic view of the interviewing process and to acknowledge participants' perspectives and experiences, understand the implications of dialogue between interviewers and participants, guide data collection to address research questions and aims of a study, and ensure that high-quality data is collected for analysis. This article addresses the need to integrate a holistic perspective into data collection and reviews general and specific interviewing considerations, including assessment and conceptualization of potential research vulnerability of participants, factors that may influence the quality of data collected through interviews, interviewing strategies, interview facilitation, and specific strategies to acknowledge a specialized population in terms of vulnerability, dialogue, power, and study rigor.

Understanding interventions and outcomes in mothers of infants.

The first two years after an infant's birth is a time of transition for mothers as changes in roles, responsibilities, expectations, and behaviors occur in response to the demands of caring for newborn infants and young children. Mothers play pivotal roles in overall child development and health and may benefit from nursing intervention that assists in the transition to motherhood. A review of the intervention literature related to the promotion of effective mothering was performed in order to examine the range of interventions and evidence of their usefulness for maternal-child and pediatric nursing practice.

Outcomes in children experiencing neurologic insults as preterm neonates.

Germinal matrix-intraventricular hemorrhage, periventricular hemorrhagic infarction, and periventricular leukomalacia are common brain injuries in preterm infants that can have significant long-term influences on children's development, physical skills, and cognitive functioning. Characteristics of preterm infants, including immature cerebrovascular autoregulation, fragility of blood vessels, and the presence of the germinal matrix, increase their vulnerability to neurologic injury. Grades I-II germinal matrix-intraventricular hemorrhage tends to have little-to-moderate long-term impact on cognitive and neuromotor development after the neonatal period, while more severe hemorrhage is associated with less optimistic developmental prognoses.