Design and outcomes of a nurse practitioner preceptor development program.

Nurse practitioners (NPs) are educated to provide high-quality patient- and family-centered care to underserved, culturally diverse, medically complex populations. Nurse practitioner faculty plan curricular activities that challenge NP students to critically assess individuals and populations with the goal of preparing NP students to be "practice-ready" upon graduation. Nurse practitioner clinical training occurs in practice settings with NP preceptors, with specific areas of clinical expertise.

Implementing an OR Contact Precautions Decision Algorithm to Promote Interprofessional Teamwork for Infection Prevention.

Perioperative nurses use aseptic and sterile technique along with standard cleaning and disinfection practices to prevent surgical site infections. At our hospital, OR team members identified a clinical problem: the lack of a systematic approach to determine the type of postprocedure cleaning required between procedures involving patients with multi-drug resistant organisms or Clostridium difficile. Facility leaders developed a project to design and implement an evidence-based decision-making algorithm to help perioperative nurses rapidly identify the appropriate environmental cleaning procedures for these ORs.

Large-Scale Hospital Mattress Switch-Out Leads to Reduction Hospital-Acquired Pressure Ulcers: Operationalization of a Multidisciplinary Task Force.

Background: Identifying strategies to protect patients most at risk for hospital-acquired pressure ulcers (HAPU) is essential. HAPUs have significant impact on patients and their families and have profound cost and reimbursement implications.

Aims: This article describes the successful implementation of a hospital-wide mattress switch-out program using a Multidisciplinary Task Force, which resulted in a decrease in HAPUs and significant cost savings.