Improving Access to Laboratory Monitoring in Individuals Living with Serious Mental Illness.

Safe prescribing for persons with severe mental illness requires laboratory monitoring for psychotropic drug levels and metabolic side effects. Barriers to appropriate and timely monitoring increase when clients must obtain phlebotomy services at a separate facility. This quality improvement project was conducted within a program for assertive community treatment (PACT).

Bringing Personalized Medicine to a PACT Program: A Quality Improvement Project.

Programs for assertive community treatment (PACT) serve persons with severe mental illness who have been unsuccessful with traditional outpatient services. Many PACT clients struggle to obtain symptom relief with medications that often have poor efficacy and undesired side effects, which can result in nonadherence, relapse, and increased health care utilization with associated costs. This quality improvement project aimed to improve client and PACT program outcomes by incorporating pharmacogenomic testing into the psychopharmacological decision-making process.

Becoming a registered nurse: the nurse extern experience.

Little is known about the perceptions of nursing students externing in newly developed hospital-based programs that focus on socialization and transition to the registered nurse (RN) role rather than on institutional recruitment and retention goals. This qualitative study explored student nurse externs' expectations, experiences, and benefits of participation in a student-focused externship program. Externs wanted to gain experience with skills and learn what it was like to be an RN.

Patient and parent/guardian perspectives on the health care of adults with mental retardation.

Individuals with mental retardation and their parents/guardians have long been neglected in health care research. In this study we used a qualitative methodology to describe the experiences adults with mental retardation and their parents/guardians have with the delivery of primary care services. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 12 adults who had mental retardation and 9 parents/guardians.

Advanced practice nursing model for comprehensive care with chronic illness: model for promoting process engagement.

New models of providing care to chronically ill persons are needed that can facilitate a more integrative approach to patient care. The purposes of this article are to describe the utilization of a theory synthesis process for development of a client-focused approach for advanced practice nurse (APN) management of chronic illness and to present the Model for Promoting Process Engagement. The model was developed as a theory-driven intervention to address complexities of chronic illness care.