Using second life to facilitate peer storytelling for grieving oncology nurses.

Background: Oncology nurses often experience intense emotional reactions to patient deaths but may be forced to ignore or hide their feelings because of work-related responsibilities. The complexity of nurses' work and personal lives creates obstacles for participating in traditional support groups where grieving nurses can bond and share. We hypothesized that using a web-based, three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world technology (Second Life) may provide a venue to facilitate peer storytelling to support nurses dealing with grief.

Nursing journal clubs and the clinical nurse specialist.

Purpose/objectives: The purpose of this article was to describe the clinical nurse specialist's role in developing and implementing a journal club. Tools for critiquing clinical and research articles with an application of each are provided.

Background: The journal club provides a forum through which nurses maintain their knowledge base about clinically relevant topics and developments in their specific clinical discipline, analyze and synthesize the relevant scientific literature as evidence, and engage in informal discussions about evidence-based and best practices.

Cognitive Consequences of Aging with HIV: Implications for Neuroplasticity and Rehabilitation.

Combination active antiretroviral therapy prevents HIV from replicating and ravaging the immune system, thus allowing people to age with this disease. Unfortunately, the synergistic effects of HIV and aging can predispose many to become more at-risk of developing cognitive deficits which can interfere with medical management, everyday functioning, and quality of life. The purpose of this article is to describe the role of cognitive reserve and neuroplasticity on cognitive functioning in those aging with this disease.

Strategies to improve delirium recognition in hospitalized older adults.

As 24-hour caregivers, nurses' detection of delirium is critical to physician diagnosis because of the waxing and waning of delirium-related clinical features. However, nurses fail to accurately interpret delirium-related clinical features more than 30% of the time.

A journey to leadership: designing a nursing leadership development program.

Nursing leadership development is important in today's changing health care climate. Nurse leaders affect staff satisfaction, patient outcomes, and the fiscal status of most health care organizations. This article delineates why leadership development is important to nursing, how to strengthen nursing leadership, how to design a methodology for building an internal nursing leadership development program based on levels of curriculum content, and what members of an organization can help teach the curriculum.

A plan for the delegation of epinephrine administration in nonpublic schools to unlicensed assistive personnel.

Professional nurses in nonpublic schools address variables in their practice that are different from nurses in a public school setting. These may include lack of funds for full-time nursing, different educational requirements, incorporation of religious beliefs into the social milieu, and inadequate peer or union support. These variables are problematic when public law health statues require change in school/parent/student relationships.