OBJECTIVE To test a causal model of the impact of (a) nursing unit context on professional nursing practice; (b) professional practice on selected organizational (nurses' work satisfaction, nursing turnover, average length of patient stay) and patient outcomes (patient satisfaction, rate of reported medication errors, and falls); and (c) nursing unit context on these same organizational and pat...

HOULIHAN GD (1999) Journal of Advanced Nursing 29(5): 1137-1143 The evaluation of the ‘stages of change’ model for use in counselling client’s undergoing predictive testing for Huntington’s disease Nurses are increasingly working in new and novel situations which may be outside the realms of traditional nursing practice. Therefore when evaluating theories and models that may be utilized in thes...

BACKGROUND In 2008 the Nursing Secretariat of Ontario's Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care formed a Nursing Workload Steering Committee to oversee the implementation of three demonstration projects with the objectives: to assess the feasibility of Health Outcomes for Better Information and Care (HOBIC) data as a measure of nursing workload, determine the indicators that best support nurse le...

This paper presents methods for identifying and analyzing associations among nursing care processes, patient attributes, and patient outcomes using unit-level and patient-level representations of care derived from computerized nurse documentation. The retrospective, descriptive analysis included documented nursing events for 900 Labor and Delivery patients at three hospitals over the 2-month pe...

P robabilistic graphical models (PGMs) have become a popular tool for computational analysis of biological data in a variety of domains. But, what exactly are they and how do they work? How can we use PGMs to discover patterns that are biologically relevant? And to what extent can PGMs help us formulate new hypotheses that are testable at the bench? This Message sketches out some answers and il...

BACKGROUND While the Iranian nursing profession tries to reach to its full capacity for participating in the maintenance of public health, its desire to develop is strongly influenced by cultural, economic, and religious factors. The concept of empowerment is frequently used in nursing and the health services, particularly in relation to the quality of care, since the mission of nursing is to p...

The degree of competition in the nursing home industry has profound implications for regulations, quality and pricing decisions. This paper presents a model of spatial competition in the nursing home industry to investigate how consumer preferences over location can affect the substitutability and the degree of competition between geographically differentiated nursing homes. A random coefficien...

The Canadian Health Outcomes for Better Information and Care (C-HOBIC) project introduced systematic use of standardized clinical nursing terminology for patient assessments. Implemented so far in three Canadian provinces, C-HOBIC comprises an innovative model for large-scale capture of standardized nursing-sensitive clinical outcomes data within electronic health records (EHRs). To support thi...