The aging veteran population: Promoting awareness to influence best practices.

The older adult population is the most rapidly growing population in the United States. It is projected that by 2035, the population of adults older than 65 years is expected to be greater than the population of children. The projected number of Veterans age 60 and older is about 11 million.

An online education approach to population health in a global society.

Background: Health professions education content must keep pace with the ever-evolving and changing health care system. Population-based health care is advocated as a way to improve health outcomes, particularly in a technologically advanced health system like the United States. At the same time, global health knowledge is increasingly valued in health professions education, including nursing.

Meeting a Growing Need: An Online Approach to Cultural Competence Education for Health Professionals.

Prelicensure education may inadvertently lead to a belief that learning about different cultures is an end point, whereas cultural competency is an ongoing process. An online cultural competency education module incorporating organizational cultural assessment was developed for graduate nursing education. After completion, nurses have reported intent to continue career-long cultural competence learning and expressed determination to promote cultural competence in organizations where they work and lead.

Routine 24-Hour Computed Tomography Brain Scan is not useful in stable patients Post Intravenous Tissue Plasminogen Activator.

Background: Obtaining a routine computed tomography (CT) brain scan 24 hours after treatment with intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (IV-tPA) is included in the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association acute stroke guidelines. The usefulness of the test in stable patients is not known. We hypothesized that the results of routine, 24-hour post-treatment neuroimaging (CT or magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] brain scans) would not alter the management of clinically stable patients.

Regulation and mindful resident care in nursing homes.

Regulatory oversight is intended to improve the health outcomes of nursing home residents, yet evidence suggests that regulations can inhibit mindful staff behaviors that are associated with effective care. We explored the influence of regulations on mindful staff behavior as it relates to resident health outcomes, and offer a theoretical explanation of why regulations sometimes enhance mindfulness and other times inhibit it. We analyzed data from an in-depth, multiple-case study including field notes, interviews, and documents collected in eight nursing homes.

The Nature of Staff - Family Interactions in Nursing Homes: Staff Perceptions.

Each year thousands of older adults are admitted to nursing homes. Following admission, nursing home staff and family members must interact and communicate with each other. This study examined relationship and communication patterns between nursing home staff members and family members of nursing home residents, as part of a larger multi-method comparative case study.

Avoiding socialization pitfalls in accelerated second-degree nursing education: the returning-to-school syndrome model.

Second-degree students are highly motivated and tend to excel academically. However, nurse educators in accelerated programs face challenges in socializing these students to the nursing role. One pitfall is the hostility that may develop if students perceive a mismatch between their expectations and their new role as baccalaureate nursing (BSN) students in a fast-paced and intense program.

Barriers to and facilitators of clinical practice guideline use in nursing homes.

Objectives: To identify barriers to and facilitators of the diffusion of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) and clinical protocols in nursing homes (NHs).

Design: Qualitative analysis.

Setting: Four randomly selected community nursing homes.

"The Golden Rule": Only a starting point for quality care.

The Golden Rule guides people to choose for others what they would choose for themselves. The Golden Rule is often described as 'putting yourself in someone else's shoes', or 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'(Baumrin 2004). The viewpoint held in the Golden Rule is noted in all the major world religions and cultures, suggesting that this may be an important moral truth (Cunningham 1998).

Exit interview-consultation for research validation and dissemination.

Dissemination of research findings to practice and maintenance of rigor and validity in qualitative research are continuing challenges for nurse researchers. Using three nursing home case studies as examples, this article describes how exit interview-consultation was used as (a) a validation strategy and (b) a rapid research dissemination tool that is particularly useful for nursing systems research. Through an exit interview-consultation method, researchers validated inferences made from qualitative and quantitative data collected in three comprehensive nursing home case studies that examined nursing management practices.

Connection, regulation, and care plan innovation: a case study of four nursing homes.

We describe how connections among nursing home staff impact the care planning process using a complexity science framework. We completed six-month case studies of four nursing homes. Field observations (n = 274), shadowing encounters (n = 69), and in-depth interviews (n = 122) of 390 staff at all levels were conducted.

MDS coordinator relationships and nursing home care processes.

This study describes how Minimum Data Set (MDS) coordinators' relationship patterns influence nursing home care processes. MDS coordinators interact with nursing home staff to coordinate resident assessment and care planning, but little is known about how they enact this role or influence particular care processes beyond paper compliance. Guided by complexity science and using two nursing home case studies, the authors describe MDS coordinators' relationship patterns by assessing the extent to which they used and fostered good connections, new information flow, and cognitive diversity.

Patterns of medical and nursing staff communication in nursing homes: implications and insights from complexity science.

Complexity science teaches that relationships among health care providers are key to our understanding of how quality care emerges. The authors sought to compare the effects of differing patterns of medicine-nursing communication on the quality of information flow, cognitive diversity, self-organization, and innovation in nursing homes. Two facilities participated in 6-month case studies using field observations, shadowing, and depth interviews.

Nurse assistant mental models, sensemaking, care actions, and consequences for nursing home residents.

In a nursing home case study using observation and interview data, the authors described two mental models that guided certified nurse assistants (CNAs) in resident care. The Golden Rule guided CNAs to respond to residents as they would want someone to do for them. Mother wit guided CNAs to treat residents as they would treat their own children.

5 competencies needed by new baccalaureate graduates.

As nurse educators prepare new graduates for practice, part of the challenge is to ensure that these nurses are capable of functioning in a broad continuum of care with increased responsibilities. To identify competencies needed by new baccalaureate graduates in today's health care environment and determine whether these competencies fall into particular dimensions, a cross-sectional survey design was used to query 363 nurse administrators from three health care settings. Nurse administrators rated the importance of 45 nursing competencies.