Innovative solution: Mentor program: evaluation, change, and challenges.

Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center is a level 1 tertiary teaching facility in the southwestern United States. The center developed an 18-month registered nurse mentoring program. The program, now in its third year, is revisited looking at the evaluation of retention, program challenges, and change.

Innovative solutions: family conference progress note.

The grief and anxiety of complex medical illness, with a high likelihood of death, strains communication between medical staff and patients' families in the intensive care unit (ICU). For decades, the emphasis has been on curative intent and a paternalistic approach to decision making, which has been fostered by physicians, when patients are unable to communicate for themselves. However, the past 15 to 25 years have seen a paradigm shift in both what families expect from physicians and what physicians see as the goal of medical (especially ICU) care with respect to the patient and family wishes.