The purpose of this study was to further explicate the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition in the practice of critical care nursing. For this analysis data were used from a sample of 105 nurses practicing in the adult, pediatric, and newborn intensive care units of eight hospitals in three metropolitan areas. The data were composed of group interviews in which nurses gave narrative accounts of exemplars from their practice and close observations and intensive personal history interviews of a subsample of nurses. Two interrelated aspects were found to distinguish four levels of practice, from advanced beginner through expert. First, practitioners at different levels of skill literally live in different clinical worlds, noticing and responding to different directives for action. Second, a sense of agency is determined by one's clinical world and shows up as an expression of responsibility for what happens with the patient.

OBJECTIVE: To characterize changes in key aspects of process quality received by nursing home residents before and after the implementation of the national nursing home Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) and other aspects of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) nursing home reforms. DESIGN: A quasi-experimental study using a complex, multistage probability-based sample design, with data collected before (1990) and after (1993) implementation of the RAI and other OBRA provisions. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Two independent cohorts (n > 2000) of residents in a random sample of 254 nursing facilities located in metropolitan statistical areas in 10 states. INTERVENTION: OBRA-87 enhanced the regulation of nursing homes and included new requirements on quality of care, resident assessment, care planning, and the use of neuroleptic drugs and physical restraints. One of the key provisions, used to help implement the OBRA requirements in daily nursing home practice, was the mandatory use of a standardized, comprehensive system, known as the RAI, to assist in assessment and care planning. OBRA provisions went into effect in federal law on October 1, 1990, although delays issuing the regulations led to actual implementation of the RAI during the Spring of 1991. MEASUREMENTS AND ANALYSES: Research nurses spent an average of 4 days per facility in each data collection round, assessing a sample of residents, collecting data through interviews with and observations of residents, interviews with multiple shifts of direct staff caregivers for the sampled residents, and review of medical records, including physician's orders, treatment and care plans, nursing progress notes, and medication records. The RNs collected data on the characteristics of the sampled residents, on the care they received, and on facility practices. The effect of being a member of the 1990 pre-OBRA or the 1993 post-OBRA cohort was assessed on the accuracy of information in the residents' medical records, the comprehensiveness of care plans, and on other key aspects of process quality while controlling for any changes in resident case-mix. The data were analyzed using contingency tables and logistic regression and a special statistical software (SUDAAN) to assure proper variance estimation. RESULTS: Overall, the process of care in nursing homes improved in several important areas. The accuracy of information in residents' medical records increased substantially, as did the comprehensiveness of care plans. In addition, several problematic care practices declined during this period, including use of physical restraints (37.4 to 28.1%(P <.001)) and indwelling urinary catheters (9.8 to 7%(P <.001)). There were also increases in good care practices, such as the presence of advanced directives, participation in activities, and use of toileting programs for residents with bowel incontinence. These results were sustained after controlling for differences in the resident characteristics between 1990 and 1993. Other practices, such as use of antipsychotic drugs, behavior management programs, preventive skin care, and provision of therapies were unaffected, or the differences were not statistically significant, after adjusting for changes in resident case-mix. CONCLUSION: The OBRA reforms and introduction of the RAI constituted an unprecedented implementation of comprehensive geriatric assessment in Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing homes. The evaluation of the effects of these interventions demonstrates significant improvements in the quality of care provided to residents. At the same time, these findings suggest that more needs to be done to improve process quality. The results suggest the RAI is one tool that facility staff, therapists, pharmacy consultants, and physicians can use to support their continuing efforts to provide high quality of care and life to the nation's 1.7 million nursing home residents.

A systematic review of the literature was performed to examine the impact of electronic health records (EHRs) on documentation time of physicians and nurses and to identify factors that may explain efficiency differences across studies. In total, 23 papers met our inclusion criteria; five were randomized controlled trials, six were posttest control studies, and 12 were one-group pretest-posttest designs. Most studies (58%) collected data using a time and motion methodology in comparison to work sampling (33%) and self-report/survey methods (8%). A weighted average approach was used to combine results from the studies. The use of bedside terminals and central station desktops saved nurses, respectively, 24.5% and 23.5% of their overall time spent documenting during a shift. Using bedside or point-of-care systems increased documentation time of physicians by 17.5%. In comparison, the use of central station desktops for computerized provider order entry (CPOE) was found to be inefficient, increasing the work time from 98.1% to 328.6% of physician's time per working shift (weighted average of CPOE-oriented studies, 238.4%). Studies that conducted their evaluation process relatively soon after implementation of the EHR tended to demonstrate a reduction in documentation time in comparison to the increases observed with those that had a longer time period between implementation and the evaluation process. This review highlighted that a goal of decreased documentation time in an EHR project is not likely to be realized. It also identified how the selection of bedside or central station desktop EHRs may influence documentation time for the two main user groups, physicians and nurses.

A sample of 691 African American, Hispanic, and white pregnant teenage and adult women were interviewed in the prenatal setting. On their first prenatal visit, 182 (26%) women reported physical or sexual abuse within the past year. There were significant differences between the teens and adults, with a higher percentage of teens (31.6%) reporting abuse during the prior year than adults (23.6%). The rate of abuse during pregnancy was 21.7% for teens and 15.9% for adult women. Adult women scored significantly higher than teens on two measures of mental abuse. Mental abuse was significantly correlated with physical abuse for all subjects.

We reviewed the English and Dutch literature on evaluations of patient care information systems that require data entry by health care professionals published from 1991 to 2001. Our objectives were to identify attributes that were used to assess the success of such systems and to test the ability of a framework developed by Delone and McLean for management information systems(1) to categorize these attributes correctly. The framework includes six dimensions or success factors: system quality, information quality, usage, user satisfaction, individual impact, and organizational impact. Thirty-three papers were selected for complete review. Types of study design included descriptive, correlational, comparative, and case studies. A variety of relevant attributes could be assigned to the six dimensions in the Delone and McLean framework, but some attributes, predominantly in cases of failure, did not fit any of the categories. They related to contingent factors, such as organizational culture. Our review points out the need for more thorough evaluations of patient care information systems that look at a wide range of factors that can affect the relative success or failure of these systems.

A clinically useful diagnostic method has been developed for detecting and quantitating periods of apnea in pediatric patients. This procedure, called the pediatric pneumogram, permits the continuous recording on magnetic tape, for periods of up to 13 hours, of the respiratory pattern of infants utilizing an impedance technique. This test has been employed successfully in a variety of infants to evaluate respiratory activity and has permitted the objective documentation of apneic and cyanotic episodes, as well as an assessment of the eff ectiveness of therapy.

OBJECTIVES: The documentation of the nursing process is an important but often neglected part of clinical documentation. Paper-based systems have been introduced to support nursing process documentation. Frequently, however, problems such as low quality of documentation are reported. It is unclear whether computer-based documentation systems can reduce these problems and which factors influence their acceptance by users. DESIGN: We introduced a computer-based nursing documentation system on four wards of the University Hospitals of Heidelberg and systematically evaluated its preconditions and its effects in a pretest-posttest intervention study. For the analysis of user acceptance, we concentrated on subjective data drawn from questionnaires and interviews. MEASUREMENTS: A questionnaire was developed using items from published questionnaires and items that had to be developed for the special purpose of this study. RESULTS: The quantitative results point to two factors influencing the acceptance of a new computer-based documentation system: the previous acceptance of the nursing process and the previous amount of self-confidence when using computers. On one ward, the diverse acceptance scores heavily declined after the introduction of the nursing documentation system. Explorative qualitative analysis on this ward points to further success factors of computer-based nursing documentation systems. CONCLUSION: Our results can be used to assist the planning and introduction of computer-based nursing documentation systems. They demonstrate the importance of computer experience and acceptance of the nursing process on a ward but also point to other factors such as the fit between nursing workflow and the functionality of a nursing documentation system.

As part of trust-wide practice development project to improve post-operative pain management, a descriptive study was conducted in the orthopaedic directorate of a large teaching hospital in the north of England. Sixty-five patients were included in this prospective study. Patients were interviewed post-operatively about their pain experience, and present and worst pain scores were recorded. The nursing documentation relating to pain management was also transcribed and a content analysis of this nursing documentation is reported. Findings indicate that individual assessment of pain was poorly documented and that the nurses' record of the patient's post-operative pain experience differed from the patient report. Reliance on pharmacological methods of pain relief was evident and interventions to help patients cope with night time pain were rarely documented. The results are discussed in light of a theoretical framework for acute pain management and current research. Implications for practice are discussed and areas for further research are suggested.

This paper investigates the predictive power of the Norton score in the problem of anticipating pressure lesions, and looks at some variants on that score. The Norton score is now nearly 20 years old but is still not in frequent use by nurses, and has been the subject of little research, especially in its predictive ability. By following the progress of two matched samples over a 15-month period in a district general hospital it is established that the Norton score does perform at least as well as a number of reasonable variants of it, and that in particular the physical score and incontinence score are the crucial elements. A follow-up sample in which the variants are retested confirms the usefulness of the Norton score.