Nursing Handoffs: Do We Know What Constitutes Best Practice?

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

A systematic literature review on nursing handoffs, written by nurse researcher Lee Ann Riesenberg and colleagues and featured as a CE article this month, might just shock you. The researchers found that although there is  “abundant evidence that poor communication and variable procedures result in inadequate handoffs,” surprisingly little is known about what makes nursing handoffs effective. Which is kind of incredible, given how crucial handoffs are to providing safe and effective patient care.

Of the 95 English-language articles that met the researchers’ inclusion criteria, just 20 reported on research on nursing handoffs, and only 3 were found to be of reasonably good quality (scoring above 10 on a 16-point scale). The researchers concluded that although “the Joint Commission is calling for structured handoffs . . . we found very little evidence to support the use of any specific structure, protocol, or method.”

Barriers and Strategies
But the researchers were able to identify, categorize, and list numerous barriers to and strategies for handoffs that were mentioned in the literature. […]

2016-11-21T13:18:21-05:00April 7th, 2010|nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
Read More

There’s a Place for Speed in Online Publishing–But Peer Review Is More Important Than Ever

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief

I read with interest, and also a little concern, a post on a newish blog called Nurse Story.com, which argued for faster Web-based publishing without peer review or much editing. 

Yes, the open access model of scientific publishing, with full transparency for all aspects of the review and revision process, is worth watching. Yes, more and more publishing companies are going the online only or online mostly route (and while it’s PC to say it’s in pursuit of being green, I’d bet the primary reason is because it’s cheaper). And yes, it’s much faster to publish on the Internet. You can throw up an article or blog post and change content online by the minute. But is fast and quick all we need? Technology is changing nursing practice, but is it changing our knowledge base so quickly that we shouldn’t take time to weigh and sift the good from the bad? […]

2016-11-21T13:18:53-05:00March 9th, 2010|nursing research|2 Comments
Read More

AJN’s Top 10 Articles in 2009

So, what were the most highly viewed articles of 2009 on AJNonline?

Here’s our Top Ten list – check them out:

1. Sex and Violence in the Media Influence Teen Behavior – duh!

2. Recognizing Sepsis in the Adult Patient – every nurse should know what to look for

3. Bullying Among Nurses – sad reminder that we might be our own worst enemy

4. Leech Therapy – it may be disconcerting, but it works wonders

5. The Marketing of Osteoporosis – how they turned a risk factor into a disease

6. The Nursing Shortage – this problem’s not going away soon

7. Understanding and Managing Burn Pain: Part 1 – it’s still misunderstood . . . and undertreated

8. Infection Control: Whose Job Is It? – unsafe nursing practices, you say?

9. Staging Pressure Ulcers: What’s the Buzz in Wound Care? – definitions matter!

10. Do Rapid Response Teams Save Lives? – well, it sounded like a neat idea . . .

–Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief
Bookmark and Share

2016-11-21T13:20:13-05:00January 13th, 2010|nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment
Read More

Poor Assessment of Nursing Home Residents’ Pain — What Can Be Done?

A recent study sought to find out whether relatives and caregivers (proxies) understood residents’ pain well enough to assist in pain assessment and to discover what factors affected their judgments of pain. The findings showed, however, that their reports didn’t consistently match the pain ratings of nursing home residents themselves.

It’s particularly difficult to assess pain in cognitively impaired nursing home residents. This means that there’s a lot of suffering that goes untreated. This AJN article in the December issue discusses the findings of a new study on the topic and offers some recommendations we obtained from the study authors. Here’s another excerpt:

The authors suggest that pain management in nursing homes could be improved through caregiver education, including the implementation of pain assessment education in combination with treatment. They recommend basic training for nurses and nursing assistants on pain, pain behavior, and pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic pain treatment, such as “massage, applying warmth, mobility[, and] distractions with music or story telling.” They also suggest that “treatment effects could be determined more easily using a pain observation scale.”

So check out the article, and also let us know what else can we do to more accurately assess the pain of nursing home residents.

Bookmark and Share

2016-11-21T13:20:34-05:00December 16th, 2009|nursing research, pain management|0 Comments
Read More

Required Reading: Nurses as Champions of Patient Safety

Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr

By Diana J. Mason, PhD, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief emeritus of AJN. Mason is a member of the National Advisory Committee of Kaiser Health News.

I was delighted to see Kaiser Health News publish a superb commentary by nurse researcher Mary Naylor and health economist Mark Pauly on why nurses are the key to patient safety and quality, the barriers that interfere with nurses being these sentinels, and what can be done to address these barriers. It should be required reading by all policymakers, CEOs of health care organizations, and trustees.

Bookmark and Share

2018-03-13T10:44:44-04:00December 11th, 2009|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment
Read More

Comment ground rules

1. Please be respectful.
2. We moderate all comments.

Content disclaimer

Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
Go to Top