BACKGROUND Pain assessment in persons with dementia is well known as a challenging issue to professional caregivers, because of these patients´ difficulties in verbalising pain problems. Within municipal dementia care in Sweden, pain assessment has become problematic for registered nurses, as they have entered a new role in their nursing profession, from being clinical practitioners to becoming...

Introduction: The improvement of technology has increased noise levels in hospital Wards to higher than international standard levels (35-45 dB). Higher noise levels than the maximum level result in patient’s instability and dissatisfaction. Moreover, it will have serious negative effects on the staff’s health and the quality of their services. The purpose of this survey is to analyze the leve...

It is well established that emotions are organized around two motivational systems: the defensive and the appetitive. Individual differences are relevant factors in emotional reactions, making them more flexible and less stereotyped. There is evidence that health professionals have lower emotional reactivity when viewing scenes of situations involving pain. The objective of this study was to in...

In academic writing on mentoring and preceptorship there is little consensus on the meaning or characteristics surrounding these terms. The writers of this paper contend that the correct usage of preceptorship and mentorship, which gives credence and respect to the very different concepts embedded in each, is a very important precursor to the evolution of these two concepts in nursing education...

This article reviews the physiological principles underlying the use of the pulmonary artery (PA) catheter. The procedure for PA catheter insertion, PA pressure monitoring, PA catheter removal and complications associated with the PA catheter are discussed, as are nursing management of the catheter and nursing care of the patient.

This is the second in a series of reports to share key learnings from my sabbatical. In spring and summer of 2005, I took a three-month journey through Scandinavia, Europe, Ireland and the United Kingdom to observe innovation in nursing service delivery, in particular, nursing-led services; to explore outcome measurement as it relates to nursing services; to look at patient satisfaction and imp...

This is a descriptive and quantitative study, carried out in three hospitals in the Northwest of São Paulo, Brazil. It aimed to verify the existence and use of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) by nursing teams. SOPs describe each critical and sequential step of a task to ensure its expected result. A total of 261 nursing professionals participated in the study, randomly selected from differe...

Research demonstrated nurses' education needs to be able to document nursing diagnoses, interventions and patient outcomes in the EHR. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of Guided Clinical Reasoning, a learning method to foster nurses' abilities in using standardized language. In a cluster randomized experimental study, nurses from 3 wards received Guided Clinical Reasoning (GCR...

AIM This paper is a report of a study to develop a methodology that corrects nurse staffing for nursing care intensity in a way that allows nationwide benchmarking of nurse staffing data. BACKGROUND Although nurse workload measurement systems are recognized to be informative in nurse staffing decisions, they are rarely used. When these systems are used, however, it is only possible to compare...

BACKGROUND Nursing homes are increasingly introducing electronic health record (EHR) systems into nursing practice; however, there is limited evidence about the effect of these systems on nursing staff time. AIMS To investigate the effect of introducing an EHR system on time spent on activities by nursing staff in a nursing home. METHOD An observational work sampling study was undertaken wi...