Encouraging interprofessional collaboration: The effects of clinical protocols.

Aims And Objectives: To consider the characteristics of protocol documents themselves as a factor influencing the nature of care delivery and their potential to facilitate greater interprofessional collaboration.

Background: Healthcare guidelines and clinical protocols provide important guidance and direction to health professionals in their delivery of care. By detailing requirements and actions to be taken in specified circumstances or contexts, these documents may facilitate a broadening of the pool of people able to deliver care.

Making research real: embedding a longitudinal study in a taught research course for undergraduate nursing students.

Learning how and why scholarly research underpins and informs professional nursing practice is a continual challenge for undergraduate nursing students. They find the language and methods of research to be unfamiliar and unsettling. The work of educators thus becomes the process of breaking down barriers to students' understanding of research processes and application.

Mothering a hospitalized child: it's the 'little things' that matter.

This article reports one aspect of a phenomenological study that described the lived experience of mothering a child hospitalized with acute illness or injury. The significance for mothers that nurses do the 'little things' emerged in considering the implications of this study's findings for nurses in practice. Seven mothers whose child had been hospitalized in the 12 months prior to the first interview agreed to share their stories.