The moved to evidenced-based practice from a clinical nursing question.

Registered nurses on a medical unit questioned whether current practice adequately met the emotional needs of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease hospitalized for acute dyspnea. The unit's education committee surveyed nursing staff regarding priority nursing activities during dyspneic episodes. After discussion with staff development educators, several registered nurses met with the center's nurse researcher, formed a research team, and designed a descriptive study.

Adaptive functioning and depressive symptoms in school-aged children.

Aim: This paper is a report of a secondary data analysis to the hypothesis that a child's resourcefulness moderates the relationships between the primary female caregiver's variables (depressive symptoms and learned resourcefulness) and the child's outcomes (depressive symptoms and adaptive functioning).

Background: School-aged children between 10 and 12 years of age are at an important stage of development characterized by dramatic biological and psychosocial challenges. Maladaptive functioning and depressive symptoms increase markedly in this stage.

Patterns of depressive symptoms in children.

Problem: Depressive symptoms in children have been linked to recurrent problems with depression, school problems, and risky health behaviors. Adolescent girls report depressive symptoms three to four times more frequently than adolescent boys. Few studies, however, have examined gender-related depressive symptoms in younger, school-aged children.

Relationships of family functioning, self-esteem, and resourceful coping of Thai adolescents with asthma.

Within the context of Rosenbaum's theory of learned resourcefulness, this correlational study examined the relationships among family functioning, self-esteem, and resourceful coping in Thai adolescents with asthma. A convenience sample of 132 Thai adolescents (aged 12-17 years) with asthma was recruited from the outpatient asthma clinics of four hospitals in Bangkok. Self-administered questionnaires included an assessment of demographic information and asthma status, the revised Family APGAR, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and the Children's Self-Control Scale.

Acute dyspnea as perceived by patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Like pain, dyspnea, or difficulty in breathing, is a strong subjective experience of physiologial distress. Using a model developed by DeVito, this study focused on the emotional aspects of the acute experience of dyspnea in patients diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) on a medical unit and explored nursing activities that eased the intensity of the symptoms. The study was descriptive in design and used a semistructured interview format with four open-ended questions and a numerical self-assessment of dyspnea using the Modified 0-10 Borg Scale (MBS).

Domestic violence screening in the emergency department of an urban hospital.

Victims of domestic violence appeal to the health care system through emergency room visits for injuries related to violent episodes or for proxy care for other complaints. Screening for persons who are at high risk for violence or who are victims of violence has not been performed in emergency rooms when patients present for care, nor have all health care professionals been educated in the ways to ask the questions and assess the patients. The questions for identifying domestic violence victims have not been routinely asked on admission to the emergency department, and documentation of this information is not consistent.

Barriers to screening for domestic violence in an emergency department.

Screening for persons who are victims of domestic violence is not routinely done in emergency departments (EDs) when clients present for care, nor have all health care professionals been educated in ways to ask appropriate questions to assess victimization. Since questions to identify domestic violence are not on admission sheets and documentation is inconsistent, an interdisciplinary team in the ED of an urban medical center conducted a study using five screening questions. Findings revealed inaccurate statistics for domestic violence and significant barriers for staff participation in screening of adult clients.