News on Nursing Education
Nurses Union is Getting Tougher
In what they described as a move toward becoming more like a traditional trade union, members of the New York State Nurses Association have decided that supervisors in their respective hospitals or other health care facilities can no longer serve on the association’s board of directors. Basically it looks like they are drawing a line between supervisors and rank and file nurses. The association also plans to push hard in the Legislature for rules that would mandate new nurse-to-patient ratios.
Cisco College, Texas Tech Team Up for New Nursing Program Agreement
The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) School of Nursing and the Health Sciences Center of Cisco College in Abilene have teamed up to revitalize a program designed to help licensed vocational nurses pursue an associate degree. The Texas Board of Nursing withdrew approval for Cisco College’s Associate Degree Nursing (ADN) Program in January because of fewer than 80 percent student passing rates.
Nurse Family Partnership: The Power of Nursing (Opinion)
What if you could reduce the number of babies or toddlers hospitalized by accidents or poisonings by more than half? Or provide a five to seven point IQ boost to babies born to the most vulnerable mothers. Well, there is a way. The Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) was founded 40 years ago by David Old and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to improve child and maternal health through the influence of nurses.
Advances in Patient Care Combine With Newest Technology at Nursing Conference
Emerging trends in patient care combine with advances in health care technology as thousands of nurses who care for acutely ill patients gather this week in Orlando, Fla. The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) hosts its annual National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition (NTI) Saturday, May 19, through Thursday, May 24. Some of the discussion topics include benefits and risks of health care technology and eliminating health care-associated infections and medical errors.
Career Trends for Critical-Care Nurses
Mary Stahl, RN, MSN, ACNS-BC, president of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) and clinical nurse specialist in medical cardiology at the MidAmerica Heart Institute in St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., discusses how health care reform will impact the profession (like electronic health records and ‘change fatigue’) and how critical-care nurses can best advance their own career.
New Nurse Residency Program at Massachusetts’ Baystate Medical Center
For the first time in years, new nurses are not simply falling into jobs after school. But a new nurse residency program at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., will help some get a job but likely outside of a hospital setting. Because of health care reform, the trend now is toward more nursing jobs in home-based care. The difficulty is that those nurses need to be experienced since a nurse or doctor will not be down the hall to ask for help.
Hospital’s Weighty Hiring Policies No Longer Exclude the Obese
Should medical centers be able to refuse to hire nurses and physicians who are overweight? At least one hospital thought so, but it recently changed its mind. Citizens’ Medical Center in Victoria, Texas (southeast of San Antonio), issued a hiring policy in 2011 which declared that overweight health care professionals need not apply.
