Caring for the dying and their families can be one of the most emotionally fulfilling, personalized, and loving acts a nurse can provide. This book, about the CARES tool, attempts to convey essential information on how to effectively care for the dying in a condensed and readily applicable format for the bedside nurse. It is divided into seven parts. A general background and the establishment of the CARES tool are found in Part I. The second part presents a detailed breakdown of the CARES tool by sections (comfort, airway, restlessness and delirium, emotional and spiritual support, and self-care). Part III shares the theoretical foundation of the CARES tool, and emphasizes the need for patient advocacy and strong communication skills. It also explores what can be done to promote a peaceful death. The fourth part consists of two chapters which address the changes in our culture that must occur and the new role of the doctor of nursing practice (DNP) for translating the current literature into evidence-based practice. Part V examines how the use of the CARES tool can impact nursing care and encourage end-of-life care involvement by other health care providers, and how hope can be nurtured for the dying. The penultimate part of the book provides insight into CARES tool application strategies employed at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada. The last part summarizes the example scenario of an individual final journey and the individualized care he and his family were given in an effort to provide a peaceful and loving death. It also provides some recommended websites, readings, and references to continue the reader’s education on evidence-based compassionate care of the dying.

Growing numbers of nurses are working in long-term care and playing a major role in the provision of long-term care services. This book provides an overview of the unique aspects of long-term care with a specific focus on nurses working in nursing home and assisted living settings. It offers a review of the unique aspects and settings for long-term care, special needs of the population served, and clinical challenges. The book is divided into five parts. The first part provides the basics of long-term care with chapters covering nursing responsibilities, regulations, and cultural change. The nursing process is discussed in Part II, which focuses on the minimum data set (MDS), assessment needs beyond the MDS, assessment skills, creative care plans, person-centered care and family care. The challenges involved in clinical settings such as promotion of medication safety, and reduction of medication errors and common risks are dealt with in the third section. As a significant number of individuals who need long-term care services have cognitive impairment, Section IV is devoted to the care of residents with dementias. Management skills, legal risks, and issues pertaining to surveys are presented in Section V. In recognition of the stresses that can arise in long-term care nursing, a chapter is dedicated to the important topic of self-care.

This book is designed to help nurses and other health professionals develop compelling proposals for PhD dissertations; National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants, fellowships, and career development awards; and proposals for education, translation, evidence-based practice, and demonstration projects, including those for the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) capstone project. It takes readers through all the parts of developing a proposal, selecting a problem; showing the significance of the problem; describing the work already done on the problem and the need for further work on the problem or its solution; describing their preliminary work, when relevant; and detailing their design and methods. Then, the book offers innovative ideas for writing a dissertation proposal or a proposal for a DNP project or other type of evidence-based practice project. In describing proposals for NIH funding, the book gives detailed instructions on what content to include and how to organize the Specific Aims section and provides similar details on writing the Significance, Innovation, and Approach sections. Finally, it offers guidance in composing a title and abstract, preparing the additional materials needed for a proposal, and developing a budget. It also addresses the processes of writing proposals, submitting a grant proposal, the review, and a possible resubmission.

Nurses who provide care that is culturally congruent with patients’ healthcare values and beliefs are better able to promote health among culturally diverse populations, prevent complications from delayed treatment, and ensure quality care for all patients. By identifying populations at high risk for disease, and delivering effective and culturally appropriate care, nurses help reduce healthcare costs and healthcare disparities at the same time. However, despite the rapidly increasing body of knowledge on cultural competency, the goals of becoming culturally competent and reducing healthcare disparities are not easy to achieve. Many nurses continue to express concern and confusion about what it really means to be culturally competent. The author takes the position that the process always begins with the nurse’s careful self-assessment. The book is divided into 14 chapters. The Staircase Model, developed by the author and presented in Chapter 1, assists nurses in this process. By applying the Staircase Self-Assessment Model, nurses are guided toward a conscientious self-reflection that enables them to determine their personal level of cultural competency in the care of a particular patient population. Chapter 2 offers a description of current cultural assessment models to be used by the nurse to explore the patient’s cultural background and healthcare needs. Chapter 3 focuses on nurses’ interactions with one another as colleagues when there are language or cultural differences between them. In Chapters 4 through 14, the reader explores topics and case examples that focus on more challenging nurse–patient situations. The journey to cultural competency is one of ongoing, conscientious self-reflection, cultural assessment, and collaboration between the patient and the nurse. The book offers nurse readers a step-by-step approach to developing those skills.

With the move towards assuring the public that nursing students are graduating with the needed competencies to step into their very important careers, competency-based education (CBE) has become increasingly important. This book describes how competence is the outcome and how nursing students can rise to meet the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective skills needed to become professional nurses that make a positive impact on the health of individuals, families, and communities. The Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis has underscored the importance of CBE. Nurse educators throughout the country have analyzed standards, criteria, regulations, and student learning outcomes to define the competencies needed during this disruptive time in nursing education. Nurse educators have creatively and innovatively assisted nursing students to meet the needed competencies in alternative formats, thereby ensuring graduates will have the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective skills needed to become excellent professional nurses. The book is arranged to assist nurse educators to understand and reflect on the concepts and components of CBE, as well as the pragmatic implementation of CBE. It is a clear, succinct tool needed by nurse educators to move from a traditional nursing curriculum to one that ensures that nursing students are ready for today’s healthcare challenges. This book format uses examples and evidence to assist nurse educators to take the first steps in moving a nursing program towards a CBE and ensuring nursing graduates are ready to face evolving healthcare needs and future events.

A major challenge for nurses including faculty, clinicians and students has been, and continues to be, to engage in more scholarly writing. This book defines scholarly writing as writing that involves the transfer of new knowledge. The types of scholarly writing explored in the book are not limited to publications in research and practice journals but also proposals, abstracts, letters, articles in popular press including newspapers, magazines, blogs, and more. Knowledge moves through the discipline of nursing in many ways. The results of rigorous research which document effective and efficient strategies to improve patient outcomes are only widely available when the findings are published. The outcomes of evidence based practice projects, quality improvement projects, or other scholarly projects are commonly reported only within the local organization where the project is conducted. Widely accessible publication of information about best practices is vital for those practices to be extensively distributed to improve the care for a larger number of patients. Publication is a much more than a nice hobby when time is available, it is essential to improve patient outcomes. If you have knowledge that is not widely known, it is your professional responsibility to publish that knowledge. The value of this book is that it explains how to disseminate new knowledge to improve patient care. This book is an excellent resource for authors who want to publish their scholarly products. It is especially insightful with strategies to avoid common pitfalls in the authorship trajectory. Scholarly writing skills matter. The good news is that scholarly writing skills can be learned. The book wisely starts with an in-depth examination of strategies to overcome typical barriers to starting the writing process by acknowledging authorship ambivalence. It also addresses the challenge of revising papers as well as coauthorship issues.

This book is intended as an approachable reference guide for one of the most common neurological conditions, Parkinson’s disease and the spectrum of Parkinson-like syndromes. Parkinson’s disease is a slowly progressing neurodegenerative disease that primarily affects older adults. The book outlines the new advances in the management and treatment of the Parkinson patient, comparing risks and benefits as well as efficacy of new and older anti-Parkinson’s disease drugs. The task of diagnosing Parkinson’s disease and providing comprehensive guided treatment requires a multidisciplinary approach. Those involved in the diagnosis and care of the patient include neurologists; nurse practitioners; nurses; physical, occupational, and speech therapists; sleep medicine specialists; neuropsychologists; psychiatrists; radiologists; nutritionists; and social workers. The book is divided into seventeen chapters spread across four sections. The first section, Parkinson’s Disease, describes the following: neurobiology of Parkinson’s disease, patient exam, idiopathic Parkinson’s disease, imaging and advanced studies, neuropsychological analysis, and additional evaluations. The second section, Parkinsonisms, discusses Parkinson-plus syndromes and other Parkinsonisms. The third section, Treatment of Motor and Non-Motor Symptoms in Parkinson’s Disease, describes treatment of motor symptoms and non-motor symptoms such as autonomic dysfunction, sleep disturbances, disturbances of thought, and neuropsychiatric symptoms. The final section, Alternative Therapies and Other Considerations, talks about exercise, complementary and alternative therapies, nutrition, and caregiver burden. The book provides additional details such as Hoehn and Yahr Scoring scale, drugs that should be avoided in patients with Parkinson’s disease, patient-prepared information, standardized intake questions for evaluating a Parkinson’s patient, standardized questions for evaluating the patient in a follow-up visit, and resources in the appendices.

Nurses in clinical settings and nonclinical support roles face pressing clinical and operational issues in practice. With the face of health also changing rapidly, the unforeseen problem rears its head every day. To meet new and unexpected challenges requires explicit knowledge about emerging technologies—innovative, smart technologies developed to function intelligently, with more efficiency and accuracy. For this reason, the finer points of these technologies need understanding by practicing nurses, nursing leaders, and nurses teaching health information technology (IT), and informatics courses. This book serves to do that. It provides information about exciting areas of technology that has great potential to improve patient care. Subjects include Big Data, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented realities, Internet of Things, precision health, and the future of emerging technologies in nursing practice. There is also discussion of the shift of healthcare delivery into the community, with an outlook on improving outcomes and enhancing practice. What makes this book unique is the examination of healthcare as a technology industry, critical divergent collaborations, and the impetus of healthcare innovation. Also, Big Data is thoughtfully utilized to provide nurse value and act as the source of all emerging technologies. The book includes details about how each emerging technology drives decision making in tandem with the nursing process and critical thinking and how the novel technologies will move care delivery into the community and become a catalyst in health consumerism and the sharing economy. The book is a blueprint for a new direction for nurses in health IT, and what it will become in the next decade and the 21st century.

Writing for publication in nursing is essential to disseminate evidence, share initiatives and innovations with others, provide new information to keep nurses up-to-date, communicate the findings of research studies, and develop the science base of the profession. This book describes the process of writing, beginning with an idea, searching the literature, preparing an outline, writing a draft and revising it, and developing the final paper. How to select a journal and gear the writing to the intended audience, submit a manuscript to a journal, revise a paper and respond to reviewers, and carry out other steps to facilitate publication are discussed in the book. A chapter is devoted to writing research articles to assist nurses in preparing their work for publication; strategies are included for developing manuscripts from theses and dissertations. Other chapters describe principles for writing quality improvement articles and preparing articles that disseminate the outcomes of reviews of research evidence, articles on clinical practice topics, case reports, and chapters and books. The book serves as a reference for students at all levels of nursing education to guide them in writing papers for courses. Writing for Publication in Nursing can be used in conjunction with the style manual in the nursing program. While style manuals direct students in preparing citations, references, tables, and figures, and guide them on other aspects of style, these manuals do not teach students the process of writing or how to prepare a paper for publication in nursing. This book contains many examples and resources for writing in nursing and other health care professions. These resources make writing easier for both novice and experienced authors.

This Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology (PAG) nurse triage book is the first of its kind because it will serve as a guide to assist nurses in efficiently addressing common patient concerns in this population. Nurses serve as the first line of communication with patients and families via telephone and computerized messaging and are required to triage a wide variety of gynecologic medical questions and concerns. This triage guide has been thoughtfully constructed to approach problems from the nursing perspective. It follows a targeted format that allows nurses to easily find and scan information on common concerns faced in this patient population. The conditions and treatment plans in this younger population differ from adult gynecologic patients, which highlight the importance of a specialized triage guide. This guidebook differs from all other nursing resources currently available because it is the first text to focus on the specialized field of PAG. It addresses a multitude of commonly asked PAG patient questions and chief complaints, including acute and chronic symptoms and commonly prescribed medication side effects and use instructions. This book assists decision-making for nurses as they approach triage concerns in this specialized patient population.