Disruptive behaviors are common among hospitalized patients with psychiatric and substance abuse behaviors. Nurses working on nonpsychiatric units, however, may lack competencies to care for patients with such behaviors. A survey was developed and administered to 844 nurses across three hospital settings that revealed a lack of nurse confidence to intervene in situations that require de-escalat...

PURPOSE To describe the work of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and to encourage nurse practitioners (NPs) to use its evidence-based recommendations for clinical preventive services. SOURCES Evidence reports, recommendation statements, and journal articles published under the auspices of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force since its establishment in 1984. CONCLUSIONS A core comp...

Students taking programmes of study leading to registration as a nurse or other health and social care professional, must be assessed in practice to ensure that they are competent in a range of skills. As practice placements become more difficult to source, the use of inter-professional assessment is becoming an increasingly important facet of assessment for students in health and social care. ...

This article explains the pilot project and results of a peer review which, according to the data available, is the first such review carried out in the Croatian nursing practice. The goals of this project were to identify standards of professional performance which describe behaviour of competent professionals. Peer review is the evaluation of an individual’s professional performance for relev...

This article describes the development of an advanced nurse practitioner (ANP) service in mental health. The ANPs worked within an existing hospital at night team based at Crosshouse Hospital, a district general hospital in Kilmarnock. Set against the agenda of Modernising Nursing Careers and Modernising Medical Careers, the article describes the professional and organisational background to th...

The Readiness Estimate and Deployability Index measures the level of individual deployment readiness in Army Nurse Corps officers. The primary purposes of this pilot study were to determine the psychometric properties of the measure for Army Reserve component nurses and enlisted medical personnel and to compare the reliability between groups. The convenience sample consisted of 92 subjects. Int...

The study describes changes that are noted in students during training and which contribute to define a professional profile. We carried out a descriptive-exploratory study with a qualitative approach, based on dialectics as a theoretical-methodological framework. The data was obtained from documented analysis and through focal groups with teachers, students and service nurses. The results show...

BACKGROUND Health care professionals require some understanding of statistics to successfully implement evidence based practice. Developing competency in statistical reasoning is necessary for students training in health care administration, research, and clinical care. Recently, the interest in healthcare professional's attitudes toward statistics has increased substantially due to evidence th...

Most nurses are confident in their belief that they provide excellent care; however, many find the idea of taking an examination to demonstrate their knowledge frightening. Earning a specialty certification is one of the most important accomplishments a nurse can achieve for oneself, one’s patients, and one’s employer, as it signifies knowledge and practice competency in the specialty (Oncology...

it is widely accepted in many parts of the world thatcommunity nurses are of vital importance in various phases of disaster response and management. in china, however, it is not clear whether the chinese community nurses are able to assume disaster-related duties due to the lack of a systematic assessment.a pre-designed and well-tested questionnaire was employed to evaluate the competency in di...