GROWTH: A Strategy for Nursing Student Retention.

Background: Faculty focused on student success may look for opportunities to facilitate nursing student retention. Students commonly struggle with study skills, time management, and critical thinking in the nursing curriculum. This article presents the GROWTH (Growth, Readiness, Opportunity, Work, Time management, and Habits) form, an open-ended question form aimed at the identification of affective, environment, and psychosocial variables known to impede nursing student success.

Impacting the Patient's Experience in a Children's Hospital Using a Communication Bundle Strategy.

Background: The aim of this quality improvement project was to determine whether a communication bundle would impact parents' ratings of nurse-child communication in relation to (a) how often the nurse listened carefully to the child and (b) how often the nurse explained things in a way easy for the child to understand.

Local Problem: The Child Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores on the unit lagged behind the hospital's 75th percentile external benchmark established by the National Research Corporation.

Methods: A convenience sample of the unit's staff participated in the project.

Transitioning Nurse Handoff to the Bedside: Engaging Staff and Patients.

The emergency department is a complex environment in which reliable communication is vital for safe patient care. Communication during nurse shift report can be risky without an effective report process in practice. Reliability improves with the use of a standardized, patient-centered nurse handoff process.

Mitigating the Impact of Nurse Manager Large Spans of Control.

Nurse managers are instrumental in achievement of organizational and unit performance goals. Greater spans of control for managers are associated with decreased satisfaction and performance. An interprofessional team measured one organization's nurse manager span of control, providing administrative assistant support and transformational leadership development to nurse managers with the largest spans of control.

Implementing an Alcohol Withdrawal Protocol: A Quality Improvement Project.

This quality improvement project evaluates the effectiveness of implementing an evidence-based alcohol withdrawal protocol in an acute care setting. Patient outcomes, length of stay, and nurses' knowledge and satisfaction with care are compared pre- and postimplementation. Implementation resulted in significant reduction of restraint use, transfers to critical care, 1:1 observation, and length of stay, whereas no reduction was seen in rapid response calls.

Frontline Nurse Engagement and Empowerment: Characteristics and Processes for Building Leadership Capacity.

Improving health care quality is the responsibility of nurses at all levels of the organization. This article describes a study that examined frontline staff nurses' professional practice characteristics to advance leadership through the understanding of relationships among practice environment, quality improvement, and outcomes. The study design was a descriptive quantitative design at 2 time points.

Fall Prevention for Older Adults Receiving Home Healthcare.

Falls pose a significant risk for community-dwelling older adults. Fall-related injuries increase healthcare costs related to hospitalization, diagnostic procedures, and/or surgeries. This article describes a quality improvement project to reduce falls in older adults receiving home healthcare services.

Improving transition of care for veterans after total joint replacement.

Background: Patients transitioning from hospital to home are at risk for readmission to the hospital. Readmissions are costly and occur too often. Standardized discharge education processes have shown to decrease readmissions.

Bridge to shared governance: developing leadership of frontline nurses.

Transforming health care systems to improve quality is the responsibility of nurse executives and frontline nurses alike, yet frontline nurses are often ill-prepared to share leadership and accountability needed for transformation. The aim of this qualitative study was to describe the process used to build leadership capacity of frontline nurses engaged in resolving operational failures interrupting nursing care. The leadership development process served to bridge staff transition to shared governance.

Evidence-based nursing education: effective use of instructional design and simulated learning environments to enhance knowledge transfer in undergraduate nursing students.

Much confidence has been placed in the nursing profession's potential to positively impact the U.S. health care system.

Transforming Care at the Bedside (TCAB): enhancing direct care and value-added care.

Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a Transforming Care at the Bedside initiative from a unit perspective.

Background: Improving patient outcomes and nurses' work environments are the goals of Transforming Care at the Bedside. Transforming Care at the Bedside creates programs of change originating at the point of care and directly promoting engagement of nurses to transform work processes and quality of care on medical-surgical units.

Effectiveness of simulation-based orientation of baccalaureate nursing students preparing for their first clinical experience.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a 2-day, simulation-based orientation for baccalaureate nursing students preparing to begin their first clinical experience. Students were recruited for participation in the study from a clinical foundation course. Actors (standardized patients) provided students with the chance to engage with simulated real patients in realistic clinical situations prior to entering the clinical setting.

"Change can be good": unit perspectives on transforming care at the bedside.

Background: How do nurses commit to effecting change, the kind of change that will transform both care received and the caregiver? This was the mission of Transforming Care at the Bedside, the 2003 initiative sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Institute of Healthcare Improvement. OBSERVATIONS AND OBJECTIVES: This analysis reflects processes and context of unit change through Transforming Care at the Bedside. Organizational leadership includes engagement in change.

Concept mapping a baccalaureate nursing program: a method for success.

The understanding of curricular design and development is paramount for faculty. For novice faculty, learning teaching methods commonly takes precedence over understanding curriculum development. Professional accrediting bodies of nursing programs require curriculum course content to be pertinent and flow logically.