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Holistic Admissions Criteria in Prelicensure Nursing Programs

Photo by Christina via Unsplash

As a high school student, Gaby worked nearly full-time to support her family. She also helped care for her grandfather who was in failing health, giving him daily insulin injections and attending to his care. She dreamed of going to nursing school after graduation. Still, her classroom grades, which suffered because of her other commitments, were insufficient for admission to the nursing program of her choice.

Philip, a high school athlete, was captain of a championship basketball team. He had the passion and personality to be a great nurse and wanted to follow in his mother’s footsteps in the profession. Unfortunately, his grade point average (GPA) was below the cutoff for admission to his local nursing program.

Dreams of joining the nursing profession were halted for both of these potentially excellent nurses, both of them first-generation Americans and members of populations underrepresented in nursing. Some prelicensure nursing schools use a comprehensive approach for admission, but far too many still use academic achievements and standardized test scores as the sole criteria for accepting students into their program. Admission to nursing schools in the United States remains far from standardized, even though all nurses must pass the same national licensing […]

2024-03-06T19:28:32-05:00March 6th, 2024|Nursing, nursing students|1 Comment

Why Nurses Assist Falling Patients Despite the Risk

A too-common scenario.

Joe opens his eyes and looks through the window of his hospital room. He has always been early to rise. Even at age 82, he can’t shake the habits he learned when he was young.

“I’m woozy again,” Joe thinks as he sits up in bed. His medication sometimes makes him feel that way. Joe presses the call light so a nurse can help him to the bathroom. The nurses have been reminding him to do that so he won’t fall.

Then he reconsiders. “I can make it on my own. I don’t want to bother the nurses. They need to help the patients who really need it.” Joe moves to the edge of his bed. His walker isn’t nearby, but he urgently needs to reach the bathroom. Still dizzy, Joe holds onto the bed for a moment to keep from falling forward. After a moment, he manages to stand up and walk to the bathroom. As he enters the room, his dizziness returns, and his legs suddenly feel weak.  A feeling of dread washes over Joe as he begins to fall…

Nurse Smith starts her rounds and is looking forward to seeing Joe. He is always up early to greet her with a smile and a joke. As she opens the door to his room, she sees him entering his bathroom without his walker. She moves quickly toward him, but he suddenly sways forward. She knows he is going to fall. Reacting immediately, she grabs him by the torso […]

Leveraging AI and Technology for Comprehensive Research: Tips for Researchers and Students

The research-to-practice gap.

Today’s rapidly changing health care settings require medical and nursing professionals and students to remain up to date on trending research, topics, and evidence for guiding practice. While this may sound fundamental for nurses, multiple barriers make this incredibly challenging. Factors such as limited time, large volumes of new research to sift through, and experience with reading and analyzing research contribute to what is known as the research-to-practice gap. This blog post will explore how to harness AI and technology to gain a high-level and comprehensive overview of a research topic of interest.

Define the topic.

Before leveraging AI tools, it’s critical to develop the focus of the topic of interest. It is helpful to frame or organize your topic or area of interest to ensure the search is thorough. For example, you could use the PICO format (patient/population, intervention, comparison, and outcomes) to phrase your question or area of interest.

Let’s say you want to learn more about skin damage related to external urinary devices for adult females. A good PICO question might be: Among adult females in acute care settings, what type of skin damage occurs when using external urinary devices compared to those who do not use these devices?

Search the literature.

Searching academic databases can be […]

AI and Nursing: Are We Ready?

Three considerations about nursing and AI.

Lisiane Pruinelli

In my role as a nursing professor under the University of Florida Artificial Intelligence Initiative (ai.ufhealth.org) and in leading several national and international efforts, I apply what I’ve learned in years of clinical and educational experience to articulate the implications of AI for the nursing profession.

Doing so, I see three broad considerations that will affect the profession’s future. 1) The need to take into account the history of the nursing profession and the fact we are the most trusted profession in the US, 2) The question of how we can best incorporate new technologies and/or ideas into the care we deliver every day, and 3) The issue of how we can build the new generation of nurses while also training current nurses in order that they can play a role at the forefront of the AI/health care revolution while continuing to be strong advocates for safe and ethical care.

These three considerations are elaborated below:

  • Nursing is the most trusted profession in the United States. Since the early conception of nursing as a profession, nurses have been and still are the ones standing by every patient/client 24/7. Nurses go to war to care for people; nurses are in every […]

Implementation Science: Systematic, Sustainable, Evidence-Based Change

By Cagkan/Adobe Stock

Reading the article by Russell-Babin and colleagues in the December 2023 issue of AJN made me grateful for all the work that went into developing the nursing implementation science (IS) program at Inova. As a nurse working at this health care system, I’d like to share how I benefited from being in the first cohort of nurses trained and engaged in IS over the last three years.

For the past eight years, I’ve been a clinical coordinator of two different disease-specific programs—first stroke and now sepsis. In these roles, I’ve been engaged in many different quality improvement (QI) projects and have become familiar with the tools and processes used to improve patient care and outcomes.

Towards more comprehensive and systematic evidence-based change.

However, as I was invited to step into the world of IS, I began to realize that a strict QI approach cannot alone bring about all the changes we desire within the complex systems of health care. The fact is that […]

2024-01-11T10:06:42-05:00January 11th, 2024|Nursing, nursing roles, Quality improvement|1 Comment
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