*Department of Emergency Medicine, Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, Children’s Hospital of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, †New Jersey Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, and ‡Rutgers University, College of Nursing, Newark, New Jersey Reprint Address: Adam Brand Sivitz, MD, Department of Emergency Medicine, Newark Beth Israel Medical Center,...

Michelle Coffey and Gregory K. Crowder are graduate students in the family nurse practitioner program at Duke University, Durham, NC. Ms Coffey, a Canadian by birth, moved to the United States in 1996 to work in an emergency department. Mr Crowder, also a Canadian by birth, is now living in North Carolina. He has more than 20 years of nursing experience in critical care, cardiac catheterization...

The 2001 anthrax events have vividly illustrated that terrorism involving the release of a biological agent is a major public health emergency requiring an immediate and well-coordinated response. If healthcare professionals and emergency responders are to be prepared to manage such attacks, unprecedented cooperative efforts at the national, state, and local levels are necessary. To aid such ef...

Emergency departments (EDs) are seeking ways to utilize existing resources more efficiently as they face rising numbers of patient visits. This study explored the impact on patient wait times and nursing resource demand from the addition of a fast track, or separate unit for low-acuity patients, in the ED using a queue-based Monte Carlo simulation in MATLAB. The model integrated principles of q...

A cross-sectional descriptive study on knowledge, attitudes, and practice about emergency contraception (EC) was conducted among nurses and nursing students using a self-administered questionnaire. One-hundred-sixty-seven qualified nurses and 63 nursing students completed the questionnaire. Over 95% listed at least one regular contraceptive method but only 2.6% spontaneously listed EC as a cont...

INTRODUCTION It is widely acknowledged that nurses are crucial components in healthcare system. In their roles, nurses are regularly confronted with a variety of biological, physical, and chemical hazards during the course of performing their duties. The safety of nurses themselves, and subsequently that of their patients, depends directly upon the degree to which nurses have knowledge of occup...

BACKGROUND The high risk and low volume of medical emergencies, combined with long periods between training sessions, on 2 progressive care units at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, established the importance of transforming how nursing staff are trained to respond to medical emergencies. OBJECTIVES To increase confidence levels and improve nursing performance during medical emergencies via...