Teamwork is essential for health care providers, who must work together to ensure safe and effective patient care. The ability to function effectively as a team is especially important in critical care, where ad hoc teams are brought together for short-term management of crisis situations. Teamwork training has been widely implemented, but ongoing education and practice are needed to maintain and improve competency. This article reviews some of the literature on team science and provides recommendations for enhancing training to promote development of a shared mental model. Strategies such as ensuring multidisciplinary participation, clarifying team resources and goals, and creating practice scenarios can increase the effectiveness of training for critical care teams. Evaluation can provide immediate feedback on learning outcomes and may facilitate subsequent transfer of learning to the clinical setting. Interventions that improve a team’s ability to work toward a common goal can improve outcomes for critically ill patients.

Topic Various approaches facilitate mentoring for critical care nurses. Clinical Relevance Mentoring is an important strategy to help recruit, retain, and develop nurses with critical care expertise. Mentoring benefits nurses at all career stages, from novice to expert. Effective mentoring programs benefit not only mentors and mentees but also organizations and patients by ensuring adequate numbers of nurses with critical care knowledge and skills. Purpose Mentoring programs require careful planning to ensure that the objectives of the program align with the needs of the target audience, and that adequate resources are available to support the mentor-mentee relationship. This article identifies opportunities for mentoring in critical care nursing and provides recommendations from the literature for developing an effective program. Content Covered Various objectives for mentoring programs are described, including supporting retention, providing clinical development, and planning succession. Program logistics are explored, such as selecting mentors, matching mentors with mentees, setting goals and expectations, and evaluating the program. In addition, the article identifies strategies for overcoming common barriers to mentoring, which include a lack of time and poor access to qualified mentors.

Rapid analysis of selected laboratory tests is essential in the management of critically ill patients. These tests facilitate accurate diagnosis of clinical problems and the initiation and evaluation of appropriate therapeutic interventions. Instruments are now available to perform analysis at a site near the patient, or "point-of-care" testing. These instruments incorporate electrochemical and optical sensors capable of providing information on multiple analytes from a small sample of whole blood. In this article, the author explores the technologies behind point-of-care testing, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of in vitro, in vivo, and ex vivo modalities.

No abstract

No abstract

One year later, 88% of these octogenarians said they would undergo CABG again. Here's how nursing care set them on the right course.

No abstract