The attainment of specialty nursing certification can be beneficial for nurses, patients, and the healthcare organization alike. Barriers may prevent nurses from seeking specialty certification, which may impede healthcare organizations from increasing certification rates among nursing staff. The purpose of this article is to share the process and outcomes of 1 medical center's multimodal plan ...

The Nursing Division of the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology (SIAST) first included systems and patient safety as a priority in its institutional business and strategic plan in 2003. Three interrelated leading-edge, two-year projects (2004-2006) were launched: Best Practice, Mentorship and Patient Safety, with the intent that each project would enhance the others. This c...

BACKGROUND Advance care planning (ACP) has been identified as particularly relevant for nursing home residents, but it remains unclear how or under what circumstances ACP works and can best be implemented in such settings. We aimed to develop a theory that outlines the hypothetical causal pathway of ACP in nursing homes, i.e. what changes are expected, by means of which processes and under what...

BACKGROUND Advance Care Planning (ACP) is the repeated communication and decision-making process between the patient, family, and healthcare professionals. This study describes an ACP intervention in nursing homes and evaluates the outcomes of the implementation process. METHODS The ACP intervention was part of a 4-month complex, cluster randomized controlled trial (COSMOS). 37 Norwegian nurs...

n QA is a process of meeting quality standards and assuring that care reaches an acceptable level. Nursing homes typically set QA thresholds to comply with regulations. They may also create standards that go beyond regulations. QA is a reactive, retrospective effort to examine why a facility failed to meet certain standards. QA activities do improve quality, but efforts frequently end once the ...

PURPOSE The Resident Assessment Instrument-Minimum Data Set (RAI/MDS) is an interdisciplinary standardized process that informs care plan development in nursing homes. This standardized process has failed to consistently result in individualized care planning, which may suggest problems with content and planning integrity. We examined the decision making and care practices of personal support w...

BACKGROUND Increasingly, nursing home (NH) providers are adopting a person-centered care (PCC) philosophy; yet, they currently lack methods to measure their progress toward this goal. Few PCC tools meet criteria for ease of use and feasibility in NHs. The purpose of this article is to report on the development of the concept and measurement of preference congruence among NH residents (phase 1),...

The quality of life (QOL) of the approximately 1.5 million nursing facility (NF) residents in the US is undoubtedly lower than desired by residents, families, providers, and policy makers. Although there have been important advances in defining and measuring QOL for this population, there is a need for interventions that are tied to standardized measurement and quality improvement programs. Thi...

INTRODUCTION Concept map is a useful cognitive tool for enhancing a student's critical thinking (CT) by encouraging students to process information deeply for understanding. However, the evidence regarding its effectiveness on nursing students' CT is contradictory. This paper compares the effectiveness of concept mapping and traditional linear nursing care planning on students' CT. METHODS An...