Nursing at its best: competent and caring.

An award-winning journalist spoke to a group of students during their first month in a baccalaureate nursing program, challenging the nursing profession to abandon its image of nurses as angels and promote an image of nurses as competent professionals who are both knowledgeable and caring. This presentation elicited an unanticipated level of emotion, primarily anger, on the part of the students. This unexpected reaction prompted faculty to explore the students' motivations for entering the nursing profession and their perceptions of the relative importance of competence and caring in nursing.

Mission Possible CD ROM: instructional tool for preceptors.

Senior student preceptorship is a vital clinical component of many baccalaureate nursing curricula providing a one-on-one partnership with a registered nurse with clinical expertise. Experiential data and literature review support the preceptor's need for guidance with student assessment and evaluation strategies. This article reports on research conducted to assess the perceived increase in a preceptor's knowledge after viewing an author developed instructional CD, Mission Possible CD ROM: Instructional Tool for Preceptors.

The effects of an advanced practice nurse led telephone intervention on outcomes of patients with heart failure.

This study sought to determine the effect of an advanced-practice-nurse (APN)-led telephone intervention on hospital readmissions, quality of life, and self-care behaviors (SCBs) of patients with heart failure (HF). Twenty participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group that received the APN-led telephone intervention (ALTI) or a control group that received usual care in this pretest-posttest experimental study. The results of this study support the idea that an ALTI positively impacts outcomes of patient with HF, particularly by improving SCBs and decreasing hospital readmissions.

Facilitating transformation through collaboration.

The philosophical underpinnings of transformative education were utilized to redesign a course taught to special education majors and nursing students at a rural southeastern university. The main goal when restructuring the class was to develop a course that would encourage communication and collaboration between education and nursing majors within the school community. The current course, "Health Care Perspectives of Exceptional Students," focuses on specific health care topics, with nurse faculty presenting the health care aspects and education faculty discussing educational implications for the classroom teacher.