Establishing excellence: Implementation of an onboarding and continuing education curriculum for pediatric intensive care unit nurse practitioners and physician associates.

This study describes a novel curriculum for onboarding and clinical education for nurse practitioners and physician associates (NPs and PAs) in the pediatric intensive care unit setting. The objective was to provide details on the initial orientation and continuing education program to ensure the attainment of knowledge and skills needed to care for critically ill patients safely and effectively. A needs assessment was completed, and a knowledge gap identified in five themes: (1) in-depth knowledge on common critical care diagnoses; (2) understanding of pathophysiology; (3) disease management processes; (4) critical thinking; and (5) procedure competency.

Adolescent methylmercury exposure alters short-term remembering, but not sustained attention, in male Long-Evans rats.

Methylmercury is an environmental neurotoxicant found in fish that produces behavioral deficits following early developmental exposure. The impact of adolescent exposure to this developmental neurotoxicant is only recently being explored in animal models. Here, short-term memory and sustained attention were examined using a rodent model of adolescent methylmercury exposure.

Variable behavior and repeated learning in two mouse strains: Developmental and genetic contributions.

Behavioral inflexibility is often assessed using reversal learning tasks, which require a relatively low degree of response variability. No studies have assessed sensitivity to reinforcement contingencies that specifically select highly variable response patterns in mice, let alone in models of neurodevelopmental disorders involving limited response variation. Operant variability and incremental repeated acquisition (IRA) were used to assess unique aspects of behavioral variability of two mouse strains: BALB/c, a model of some deficits in ASD, and C57Bl/6.

Fluid Overload and Kidney Injury Score: A Multidimensional Real-Time Assessment of Renal Disease Burden in the Critically Ill Patient.

Objective: Interruptive acute kidney injury alerts are reported to decrease acute kidney injury-related mortality in adults. Critically ill children have multiple acute kidney injury risk factors; although recognition has improved due to standardized definitions, subtle changes in serum creatinine make acute kidney injury recognition challenging. Age and body habitus variability prevent a uniform maximum threshold of creatinine.