Exploring Clinical Nurse Specialist Impact in Primary Health Care: Exemplars From a Student's Clinical Practice.

Purpose/objectives: Primary healthcare (PHC) is a clinical frontier full of opportunities for clinical nurse specialists (CNSs) to improve population outcomes, facilitate smooth care transitions, and overcome challenges through a unique lens. Clinical nurse specialist practice in primary care is exceedingly rare, and there is a paucity of literature on the topic. This article provides exemplary projects implemented by a CNS student in a primary care clinic.

Rehabilitation Nursing Challenges for Patients With Lower Limb Amputation.

There are over 185,000 amputations annually in the United States, and most of these patients will receive a short inpatient rehabilitation hospital stay as part of their recovery. Complications in care after amputation can negatively impact rehabilitation and subsequent disposition and community reintegration after discharge. The purpose of this article is to discuss the literature, significance, and practice recommendations for three specific challenges-skin integrity, postamputation pain, and falls.

Do No Harm: A Multifactorial Approach to Preventing Emergency Department Falls-A Quality Improvement Project.

Introduction: Patient falls in the emergency department are a unique patient safety issue because of the often challenging nature of the environment. As there are a variety of potential causative factors for patient falls in the emergency department, this project employed a multifactorial approach to prevent patient falls in a Level 1 trauma center emergency department (adult only) in an urban tertiary care teaching hospital.

Methods: This project was a single-unit quality improvement intervention that compared postintervention monthly unit-level data to historic monthly rates on the same unit.

Pain Management Pillars for the Clinical Nurse Specialist: Summary of National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists Opioid Pain Management Task Force.

Purpose: This article describes the work of the National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists (NACNS) Opioid/Pain Management Task Force and provides guidance for the clinical nurse specialist (CNS) in evidence-based pain management interventions and organizational program development.

Description: In September 2016, the NACNS commissioned a group of pain management experts to identify the resources that CNSs need to address appropriate opioid use and pain management in various practice settings. Challenges faced by CNSs related to opioids and pain management were identified through NACNS Conference forums and a pain management survey of NACNS members.

Decreasing Opioid Utilization in Rehabilitation Patients Using a Clinical Nurse Specialist Pain Consultant Program.

Objective: To investigate whether access to a clinical nurse specialist (CNS) with expertise in pain management will result in more rapid decline in opioid use across the rehabilitation hospitalization.

Design: Retrospective chart review of patients discharged during 6 months prior to and 6 months after introduction of the CNS role.

Setting: Not-for-profit 98-bed community inpatient rehabilitation hospital.