A nursing shortage is anticipated within the next decade. Knowing what factors draw individuals to the field of nursing and help them finish their degree is important for recruitment to nursing school, but what is equally important is knowing how individuals connect and see themselves in the field of nursing. One of the contributions of health communication is examining the processes of identity formation in nursing school to determine how they construct their years of nursing school.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEffective socialization of nurses has led to positive outcomes for both hospitals and nurses, including higher retention and greater job satisfaction. The importance of faculty, preceptors, and patients in the socialization of nursing students has been documented extensively in the literature. The research presented in this article examines data from qualitative, longitudinal interview transcripts of 15 students as they progressed through a 2-year nursing program to determine how these three types of influence socialize nursing students, and at which points in their education.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnd-of-life situations are fraught with challenges for patients, family members, and individuals working at the patient's bedside. Care workers must address needs of the patient, as well as his or her distressed family members. This article is an inductive investigation of care workers' (nurses, patient advocates, and clergy) experiences with end-of-life discussions when the family asks to "do everything.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany problems can occur between family members at the end of a patient's life, resulting in conflict that others-the nurses, patient advocates, clergy, and social workers involved in the case-must resolve. This article explores the strategies used by those individuals to resolve conflict. Using grounded practical theory as a theoretical and methodological framework, qualitative interviews (n = 71) revealed how they manage family conflict at the end of life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere are currently more than 100,000 individuals waiting for an organ transplant. Organ donor registries represent the easiest and most concrete way for people to declare their intent to donate, but organ donor registries are vastly underutilized. This study reports a campaign intervention designed to increase the rate of joining the Michigan Organ Donor Registry.
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