The effect of a cultural competence educational intervention for first-year nursing students in Israel.

Purpose: To evaluate the effectiveness of an educational intervention to increase general cultural competence of first-year nursing students.

Design: This was a quasi-experimental study that used a convenience sample with an experimental group and a control group and pre- and posttesting. The sample comprised 146 first-year nursing students enrolled in the Introduction to Nursing course divided into an intervention group (n = 58) of students from one school and a control group (n = 88) including students from two schools.

Jewish laws, customs, and practice in labor, delivery, and postpartum care.

Many communities throughout the world, especially in the United States and Israel, contain large populations of religiously observant Jews. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive, descriptive guide to specific laws, customs, and practices of traditionally, religious observant Jews for the culturally sensitive management of labor, delivery, and postpartum. Discussion includes intimacy issues between husband and wife, dietary laws, Sabbath observance, as well as practices concerning prayer, communication trends, modesty issues, and labor and birth customs.

Determination of clinically meaningful levels of pain reduction in patients experiencing acute postoperative pain.

Assessment is an essential, but challenging, component of any pain management plan. Nurses who care for postoperative patients quantify and document pain by use of unidimensional scales such as the numeric rating scale, the visual analogue scale, or a verbal descriptor scale. Improvements in pain ratings on these scales are viewed as a welcome result by nurses and doctors.

Nurses' assessment of pain in surgical patients.

Aim: This paper reports a study to compare nurses' ratings of pain intensity and suffering (affect) in adult surgical patients with patients' own ratings of these variables, and to investigate whether pain ratings were influenced by cultural and ethnic differences.

Background: Studies show that postoperative pain continues to be under-treated in a large proportion of cases. The problem may be partly due to inaccurate pain assessment by nurses.