Agitation is not only a frequent and disturbing behavior for many patients with dementia, but it also troubles their caregivers and families. Many serious problems and side effects are associated with the use of medications to treat agitation; therefore, alternative approaches to treating agitation must be assessed. The current article presents results from a quality improvement pilot project that examined the usefulness of a specially designed, multisensory room intervention for geriatric psychiatric inpatients with mild to moderate agitation. Thirty-two visits to the sensory room were made by 13 inpatients with dementia. A significant decrease occurred in the Pittsburgh Agitation Scale (PAS) total scores over time from pre-room to post-room intervention, as well as 1-hour post-room intervention (F = 95.3, p < 0.001). Significant effects were found for all PAS subscales (i.e., aberrant vocalizations, motor agitation, and resistance to care), with the exception of the aggression subscale. The multisensory room intervention was effective in decreasing some symptoms of agitation in the geriatric psychiatric patient, thus contributing to positive patient, family, and nursing outcomes.
MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE unit was from the side of a gurney as I was being wheeled to the bedside of my newborn baby girl, Emily. It was only six hours after her birth, and already she had suffered several heart failures and required multiple chest tubes to help inflate her badly infected lungs. Born at 26 weeks gestational age, Emily and her twin sister, Brooke, had been taken immediately to the NICU, where Emily was now dying and Brooke was fighting to live.
Through its analysis of birth plans, documents some women create to guide their birth attendants' actions during hospital births, this article reveals the rhetorical complexity of childbirth and analyzes women's attempts to harness birth plans as tools of resistance and self-education. Asserting that technologies can both silence and give voice, the article examines women's use of technologies of writing to confront technologies of birth. The article draws on data from online childbirth narratives, a childbirth writing survey, and five women's birth plans to argue that women's silencing, or rhetorical disability, during childbirth both prompts and limits the birth plan as an effective communicative tool. The data suggest that the birth plan is not consistently effective in the ways its authors intend. Nonetheless, this analysis also demonstrates that the rhetorical failure of the birth plan can be read as, and thereby transformed into, rhetorical possibility.
This article extends a conversation about teaching begun by Michael Bérubé. Prompted by Bérubé's assertion that his publishing experience translates to better responses to student writing, the piece argues that professors can teach beyond what Bérubé calls “the six” by scaffolding student writing.
overmedicalized, and offers midwife-attended homebirth as a safe, viable option. The rhetorical-cultural analysis focuses on the documentary's reception, including twenty-six film reviews and two statements issued by the American MedicalAssociation and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The article demonstrates the role of ethos in genre reception, with a particular look at celebrity ethos associated with documentaries. The article suggests not only that visual arguments such as documentaries currently affect cultural conversations more readily than print arguments but also that dominant discourses and ideologies delimit those conversations' boundaries.
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