Beginning nursing students' initial clinical experience can be stressful and intimidating, particularly for young students having no prior healthcare experience. The authors discuss a peer mentoring project that was used to reduce anxiety during the students' first hospital experience. Both the mentored freshmen and the sophomore medical-surgical students who served as mentors reported benefits such as less anxiety, a less stressful clinical learning environment, and an increase in student interaction at various levels in the curriculum.
Nurses' contributions to healthcare organizational function and their effect on patient care outcomes will be made more explicit and can more readily be measured with terminology that captures the nursing administrative roles at three levels of practice.
Perioperative nursing is changing in response to the increasing complexity of patient care during diverse, specialized surgical procedures. As a result, designated specialty surgical teams have evolved to fulfill needs of the patient, nurse, and surgeon. This exploratory, descriptive study examined reasons for implementing specialty surgical teams, the frequency and composition of such teams, and their perceived benefits. Data concerning the prevalence and specific use of specialty surgical teams are necessary to validate and redefine the nature and role of specialized perioperative nurses.
Interest in the concept of caring and the ethics of caring has grown as technology and depersonalization of health care delivery have increased. Major concepts of the ethics of caring are reviewed, with special focus on relating caring and virtue ethics. Assuming that caring is a virtue, it is concluded that ethically virtuous nurses must possess the caring attributes and demonstrate caring actions.
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