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Showing results for tags 'Nurse'.
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Content ArticleDo you see female patients? Do they have painful periods? Pain pre or post their periods? Painful sex? Do they suffer chronic pain, which may be intermittent or constant? Do they have pain when passing urine or with bowel movements? Is it painful to place a speculum for a smear test? Have you considered endometriosis? The Royal College of Nursing has provided a factsheet for nurses with guidance on how to recognise symptoms, setting out pathways of care and signposts to useful online resources.
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Content ArticleIn conditions of intensive therapy, where the patients treated are in a critical condition, alarms are omnipresent. Nurses, as they spend most of their time with patients, monitoring their condition 24 h, are particularly exposed to so-called alarm fatigue. The purpose of this study from Lewandowska et al. is to review the literature available on the perception of clinical alarms by nursing personnel and its impact on work in the ICU environment.
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Content Article
Inside a mass vaccination centre
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Louise Cahill is clinical coordinator of a COVID-19 vaccination centre in Newport, Wales. She talks to RCN magazines about an average day and what it means to be involved in the historic immunisation programme. At the end of the article there are 10 tips for nurses talking about vaccinations to patients. -
Content ArticleThe Covid-19 pandemic has both laid bare and exacerbated the strain the cancer workforce has been under for many years. When the pandemic hit, some services were forced to pause, whilst others had to quickly adapt and many have still not ‘returned to normal’. Some cancer nurses were also deployed to care around the clock for the half a million people admitted to hospital with coronavirus. The practical and emotional impact of this disruption on people living with cancer has been profound. Macmillan’s new research establishes that cancer nurses are being stretched too thinly, trying to be there at our time of greatest need, and coping with the physical and emotional toll of the pandemic. Cancer and the devastating impact it has on lives should not be forgotten, and neither should our nurses and NHS. In this report, Cancer nursing on the line: why we need urgent investment across the UK, Macmillan is calling for Governments across the UK to invest a total of around £170 million to fund the training costs of creating nearly 4,000 additional cancer nurses required by 2030 to provide the care people need.
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Content ArticleThis research aimed to assess the effects of nurse-to-patient ratios on staffing levels and patient outcomes and whether both were associated. Results from the study suggested minimum nurse-to-patient ratio policies are a feasible approach to improve nurse staffing and patient outcomes with good return on investment.
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Content ArticleThis article, published in Medical Economics, looks at the Ethical Principles in Health Care (EPiHC), established June 2020. EPiHC serves as a global network of private health care providers, payors and investors committed to ethical conduct. It provides health care organisations with ten clear principles to navigate complex ethical decisions – principles that have never been more critical than in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Content ArticleThis manuscript provides a comprehensive overview of what healthcare worker support models are available in Canada and internationally. It outlines best practice guidelines, tools and resources that policy makers, accreditation bodies, regulators and healthcare leaders can use to assess the support needs of healthcare workers. The Canadian Peer Support Network is intended as a forum for healthcare organisations seeking guidance in the development of their Peer Support Programs to assist providers who have experienced a patient safety incident. These interventions aim to improve the emotional well-being of healthcare workers and allow them to provide the best and safest care to their patients.
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Content ArticleThis research article aimed to provide Registered Nurses with a description of patient advocacy in the clinical setting. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with 25 participants, the results of this study found the nurses had an adequate understanding of patient advocacy and were willing to advocate for patients, describing patient advocacy as promoting patient safety and quality care.
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Content ArticleThis research focuses on patient advocacy from a nursing perspective. In this qualitative study,15 clinical nurses working in intensive care units (ICUs), coronary care units (CCUs), and emergency units were interviewed regarding patient advocacy with data analysed using content analysis. After data analysis was performed, results showed that patient advocacy consisted of the two themes of empathy with the patient and protecting the patients.
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Content ArticleThis resource, published by the AHA Physician Alliance and the American Hospital Association, is a guide for health system leaders developing well-being programmes, focusing on the challenges of burnout due to COVID-19. This resource is in two-parts: COVID-19-specific resources and a guide to walk you through well-being program development and execution. These resources will help leaders build on tools already in place and learn from others who are doing this work.
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Content ArticleThis news account, published by the International Council of Nurses, highlights the mass trauma that COVID-19 has caused among the world's nurses. It details the percentage of nurses experiencing mental health difficulties across the world as a result of the pandemic.
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Content ArticleThis study, published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, investigates the processes through which personnel understaffing and expertise understaffing jointly shape near misses among nurses during the Covid-19 pandemic. It looks at survey data collected from 120 nurses in the United States of America working in hospitals during the pandemic. The authors conclude that the challenges created by understaffing of nurses have been amplified by the pandemic. They suggest that understanding the mechanisms through which safety outcomes are affected by understaffing can help healthcare organisations be better prepare for safety challenges that may arise when staffing shortages are experienced.
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Content Article
Staff safety and wellbeing
Becky T posted an article in Staff safety
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An original article that explores the significance of both staff physical safety in the workplace as well as their psychological safety and wellbeing. In particular, I highlight the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on both these areas, and discuss the importance of ensuring all aspects of staff safety. -
Content ArticleMedicines optimisation is a multidisciplinary and patient-focused approach to achieving the best patient outcomes from the use of medicines. It involves the use of medicines to control disease while ensuring that adverse effects are kept to a minimum. This article explores strategies that enable nurses to take an increasingly active role in medicines optimisation. In its conclusion the authors suggest that to ensure medicines optimisation, nurses should be involved in monitoring patients’ signs and symptoms using a structured checklist such as the ADRe (Adverse Drug Reaction Profile) to identify and address any medicines-related harms.
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Content Article
Needlestick injuries – making the point for safety
Becky T posted an article in Staff safety
An article outlining the significance of needlestick injuries - their risks to healthcare workers, their cost, and the importance of prevention. -
Content Article"To healthcare workers in the COVID era, holidays mean death, and we knew Omicron was coming before it had a name. The wave caused by this variant has barely begun, rapidly gathering steam, and we are exhausted, attempting to pull from reserves badly drained by earlier surges." Kathryn Ivey, a critical care nurse at a medical center in Nashville, Tennessee, confronts the Omicron surge filling her hospital.
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Content ArticleWith a global nursing workforce shortage upon us, governments and health system decision makers are becoming alarmed at the potential risk to service delivery if solutions are not found. However, nurses know that what constitutes the fundamental threat to a healthy healthcare system is not the hard work of nursing, but rather the demoralizing conditions under which many nurses strive to practise their profession. This commentary examines the context for some of those conditions and encourages a collective commitment to articulating our vision for the profession in a manner that is sufficiently forceful to be effective.
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Content ArticleThis study from Cho et al. examined the association of nurse staffing and education with the length of stay of surgical patients in acute care hospitals in South Korea. They found that nurse staffing and nurses’ education levels were significantly associated with the length of stay of surgical patients in South Korean hospitals. The findings from this study suggest that the South Korea healthcare system should develop appropriate strategies to improve the nurse staffing and education levels to ensure high-quality patient care in hospitals.
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Content Article
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In this blog, Lotty Tizzard, Patient Safety Learning's Content and Engagement Manager, looks at some of the patient and staff safety issues surrounding insulin delivery. These issues have been identified by a new working group set up by the Safer Healthcare and Biosafety Network (SHBN), and she also highlights potential solutions the group will explore. The SHBN is an independent forum focused on improving healthcare worker and patient safety. It has established a working group on improving injection technique and delivering dual safety in diabetes care. The working group consists of clinicians, policy-makers, charities, manufacturers and patients who are concerned about high numbers of preventable safety incidents related to diabetes treatment. -
Content ArticleThe Health Protection Agency has suggested that one in ten hospital patients experiences an incident that puts their safety at risk, around half of which could be prevented, and the RCN has identified the need to reduce nurses’ paperwork considerably. This article reports a successful project that set out to tackle these two issues by developing a risk-based nursing assessment system that is simple to use, reduces unnecessary paperwork and reduces the risk of harm to patients. It outlines how the initiative was introduced, as well as obstacles encountered during the process. The risk-assessment tool received positive feedback from nursing staff as it reduces paperwork while providing a risk-based assessment of care needs.
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Content ArticleBy autumn 2021 there could be more people suffering from Long COVID in the UK than from dementia. How can healthcare services cope with this serious challenge – a condition which can include multi-organ damage, clotting problems, disordered immune response, and renal, liver and brain issues, yet remains little understood? Dr Elaine Maxwell of the National Institute for Health Research tells us how the NIHR’s Long COVID report uncovered a growing and complex problem, and discovered that the largest group of sufferers are working age women in healthcare – AKA nurses.
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Content ArticleThis study, published in BMJ Open, seeks to evaluate variation in Illinois hospital nurse staffing ratios. It attempts to determine how higher nurse workloads are associated with mortality and length of stay for patients, and cost outcomes for hospitals. In their conclusion, the authors suggest that if nurses in Illinois hospital medical–surgical units cared for no more than four patients each, thousands of deaths could be avoided, and patients would experience shorter lengths of stay, resulting in cost-savings for hospitals.
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Content Article
Implementing a District and Community Nursing workload tool, to determine safe staffing levels and skill mix in a community care provider organisation. An economic assessment of potential benefits for workforce planning (February 2016)
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Safe staffing levels
Achieving safe district and community nurse caseloads, staffing levels and skill mix in order to deliver the increasing demand for care close to or in the home are a key challenge for primary and community care organisations in the UK. However there is a national crisis in relation to robust workforce evidence due to a lack of tools available to capture the complexity of care being delivered in different geographical locations to meet rural and urban patient population need. This paper presents a case study to illustrate the potential benefits of implementing Cassandra, a community workload analysis tool in one community provider organisation in the south of England. The Cassandra tool provides potential to: i) model the multidimensional complexity of care in different contexts and populations; ii) develop a potential blueprint for robust monitoring of decisions related to safe caseloads, staffing levels and skill mix; iii) when triangulated with other metrics, provides additional value to organisations as it enables an accurate picture to be created to monitor safe caseload, staffing levels, skill mix and competence and impacts on quality of patient care and commissioning of services in different geographies. As a place based demand tool this offers real opportunity to improve the evidence base of workforce planning and development driven by the needs of community populations. -
Content Article
COVID Nursing and PTSD (December 2021)
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Blogs
In an article for the Patient Safety Journal, Cassandra Alexander, a nurse, shares what it is like on the front lines and the toll it has taken on her mental health—a deeply personal and painful story, yet a traumatic experience shared by many nurses around the United States. -
Content ArticleThe Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has created an information hub containing resources related to their campaign for safe staffing, including: principles for staffing for safe and effective care: accountability, numbers, strategy, plans, education. information about safe staffing law and the RCN's campaigning work across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. RCN Nursing Workforce Standards. advice for nurses in dealing with unsustainable pressure at work.
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