Canada does not have enough aboriginal nurses and aboriginal nursing faculty. Consequently, there is an inadequate number of nurses to meet both on- and off-reserve and community health care staffing needs. In 2002, Health Canada asked the Canadian Association of University Schools of Nursing to facilitate a national task force that would examine aboriginal nursing in Canada. The task force engaged in an extensive literature review, conducted a national survey of nursing programs, and explored recruitment and retention strategies. In 2007, the association prepared an update on the current status. In this article, the authors review the progress made during the intervening five years in the recruitment, retention and education of aboriginal nursing students.
Academic dishonesty, whether in the form of plagiarism or cheating on tests, has received renewed attention in the past few decades as pervasive use of the Internet and a presumed deterioration of ethics in the current generation of students has led some, perhaps many, to conclude that academic dishonesty is reaching epidemic proportions. What is lacking in many cases, including in the nursing profession, is empirical support of these trends. This article attempts to provide some of that empirical data and supports the conclusion that cheating is a significant issue in all disciplines today, including nursing. Some preliminary policy implications are also considered.
The accuracy of patient records in Swedish nursing homes: congruence of record content and nurses' and patients' descriptions. Data from patient records will increasingly be used for care planning, quality assessment, research, health planning and allocation of resources. Knowledge about the accuracy of such secondary data, however, is limited and only a few studies have been conducted on the accuracy of nursing recording. The aim of this study was to analyse the concordance between the nursing documentation in nursing homes and descriptions of some specific problems of nurses and patients. Comparisons were made between wards where nurses had received training in structured recording based on the nursing process (study group) and wards where no intervention had taken place (reference group). Data were collected from the patient records of randomly selected nursing home residents (n=85). The methods used were audits of patient records and structured interviews with residents and nurses. The study revealed considerable deficiencies in the accuracy of the patient records when the records were compared with the reports from nurses and residents. The overall agreement between the interview data from nurses and from the patient records was low. Concordance was better in the study group as compared with the reference group in which the recorded data were structured only following chronological order. The study unequivocally demonstrates that there are major limitations in using records as a data source for the evaluation, planning and development of care.
There is a common interest in Swedish society in preparing nurses well for disasters. A special course in the basic nurse education programme is devoted to disaster nursing. The aim of this study is to investigate nursing students' knowledge and views of their own action at the disaster site, both in their professional role and as private persons. The present study is a descriptive one based on the students' written answers. The result shows that the students emphasize contacting the overall disaster officer, surveying the situation and carrying out basic life-saving measures in Sweden known as the ABCs. They also stress the importance of staying calm and, to a lesser extent, seeing to the needs of the mentally shocked. Thus the nursing students seem to regard treatment of physical injuries as most important in the disaster situation.
Preparing future nurses to care for dying patients and their families represents a challenge for nursing education. Affective learning, essential to nurture a caring perspective in end-of-life care, can elicit strong emotional reactions in students, to which nurse educators must remain keenly sensitive. This article presents the experience of nurse educators and students with experiential and reflective activities addressing the affective domain of learning, within an intensive 4-week undergraduate course on end-of-life care, developed with a competency-based approach. It stressed the importance of strategic teaching for developing interpersonal competencies in end-of-life care, but revealed difficulties for both nurse educators and students in assessing outcomes derived from affective learning.
Nursing students' independent projects in Sweden not only provide an opportunity to receive a professional qualification as a nurse but also gain a Bachelor's degree in nursing. The aim of these projects is to demonstrate knowledge and understanding within the major field of the education.
This study aimed to describe and analyze the topics as well as theoretical frameworks and concepts in nursing students' independent projects, which lead to a Bachelor's degree, in a Swedish context.
A total of 491 independent projects, written by nursing students in Sweden, were included in the study.
Topics together with theoretical frameworks and concepts in the projects were identified. Similar topics and theoretical frameworks and concepts, respectively, were grouped into subcategories, and similar subcategories were then merged into a main category. The number of entries in each category was counted for descriptive statistics in order to allow for the demonstration of magnitude.
The most common topics concerned experiences and managing when having an illness, experiences of care and of being a caregiver, and healthcare staff's care and knowledge. The nursing theories/models that were most often used were Eriksson's Theory of Caritative Caring, Travelbee's Human-to-Human Relationship Model, and Orem's Self-care Theory. Among the non-nursing theories/models, perspectives and concepts lifeworld, ethical values and principles, existential concepts and quality of life/health-related quality of life, were most often used by these students.
There may be some difficulty in finding a topic for the project that is relevant for both a professional qualification as a nurse, as well as for achieving the requirements of a Bachelor's degree in nursing. The study indicates that there is a need to widen the student's understanding of different nursing theories/perspectives/models/concepts during nursing education so that students are familiar with a broad range of these when conducting their independent project.
In this article the didactic perspectives of nurse instructors (NIs) is examined with the help of andragogy defined by the concepts of self-directed learning, learning as a process and lifelong learning. The results of a pilot study of ongoing research on the educational perspective of NIs, are used as examples to discuss how far NIs have accepted the features of andragogy as their didactic perspective both in their public stance and in their actions as described by NIs themselves.
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate district nurses' management of leg ulcer patients and the effects of an in-service education programme led by district nurses as local educators at primary health-care centres. METHOD: Data were collected from electronic patient records (EPRs), both before and after the educational intervention. Nineteen district nurses undertook a one-day course focusing on four themes: Doppler assessment and measurement of ankle brachial pressure index; compression treatment; patient education; nursing documentation. Fourteen acted as in-service educators; 12 educators completed the intervention.The EPRs were scrutinised with an audit tool. RESULTS: The documentation on the selected key areas for the management of patients with leg ulcers was generally sparse, although the educational intervention resulted in statistically significant effects on documentation in three areas. CONCLUSION: Further improvements in care are necessary, as are qualitative and quantitative studies to explore the large discrepancies between guidelines and everyday clinical practice in this field.
Providing continuing education to support a change in practice for a busy Emergency Department poses a challenge. Factors such as shift work, high patient acuity, and unpredictable patient flow create barriers to traditional methods of delivery of a comprehensive educational experience. This article describes an experience with introducing a change in practice using an innovative Web-based delivery plan. Specific strategies were employed to address presentation of content, application of knowledge, establishment of a shared understanding, and enhancement of communication opportunities. The Web-based learning environment proved to be a successful means of providing nurses with a collaborative learning experience around a new practice issue. This experience also highlighted the need for a new skill set for learners and educators using online learning technologies.
Recently, schools of nursing have adopted the use of high-fidelity human patient simulators in laboratory settings to teach nursing. Although numerous articles document the benefits of teaching undergraduate nursing students in this way, little attention has been paid to the discourses and texts organizing this approach. This institutional ethnography uses the critical feminist sociology of Dorothy E. Smith to examine the literature and interviews with Practical and Bachelor of Science in Nursing students, and their faculty about this experience. The research shows how discourses rationalize and sustain certain processes at the expense of others. For example, ruling discourses such as biomedicine, efficiency, and the relational ontology are activated to construct the simulation lab as part of nursing and nursing education. The analysis also highlights the intended and unintended effects of these discourses on nursing education and discusses how emphasizing nursing knowledges can make the simulation lab a positive place for learning.
