St. Joseph Hospital (Orange, Calif) sponsors conference on Pain Solutions:evidence based approaches...

St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California is hosting a conference on October 22, 2006 entitled
"Pain Solutions: evidence based approaches to the care of persons experiencing pain". 8 contact hours will be available for this conference; registrations must be be received by September 22, 2006. Please use this registration form. For more information, please contact Cheri Cancelliere at Cheri.Cancelliere@stjoe.org or call 714 771-8000, x7345.

Thank You Representative Greg Walden (OR)

Pictured: Congressman Greg Walden (OR)

The National Nurse Team welcomes the addition of Congressman Greg Walden as a cosponsor to HR 4903. Congressman Walden co-chairs the 182 member House Rural Health Care Coalition and is committed to advancing rural priorities in health care policy.

Here is Congressman Walden's statement about the National Nurse Act of 2006:

"I'm proud to strongly support the establishment of an Office of the National Nurse. Nurses are a vital link in health care delivery systems throughout the nation. They are skilled, compassionate and accessible to patients, which makes them uniquely positioned to serve as patient caregivers and as patient educators. Education efforts led by nurses could dramatically reduce the prevalence of chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, saving both lives and health care costs. An Office of the National Nurse could help bolster the coordination of such efforts, increasing their efficiency and efficacy, while also raising public awareness of the tremendous asset nurses are to health care delivery and encouraging people to consider entering the nursing profession."

Show me the Evidence by Catherine Spader, RN

Infusion therapy nurse Eun Kim, RN, BS, C, CRNI (right), shares with Mary Sampson, RN (center) and Judi Murphy, RN, BSN, PNAP III, a new method to clean central line dressing sites that has reduced infection rates by 50%. The method employs chlorhexidine gluconate in place of Betadine Solution. Photo by Winslow Martin

An article in Nursing Spectrum Feb 27, 2006 carries the same title as our blog "show me the Evidence". It describes some real life examples of implementation of EBP by med/surg nurses at Winchester Hospital in Winchester, Mass.

Julie's July Picks from the Nursing Literature

Some of these recent nursing articles really caught my eye. SJH/CHOC staff can obtain these online or request them from Burlew Medical Library. Nurses who are not at SJH/CHOC should check with their own medical libraries.

1. 2009172202 NLM Unique Identifier: 16620259. Ballen LE. Fulcher AJ.
Nurses and doulas: complementary roles to provide optimal maternity care.
JOGNN: Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing. 2006
Mar-Apr; 35(2): 304-11. (34 ref)
Burlew carries this journal

2. 2009165829. Tracy S. Dufault M. Kogut S. Martin V. Rossi S. Willey-Temkin
Translating best practices in nondrug postoperative pain management.
Nursing Research. 2006 Mar-Apr; 55(2S): Supplement: S57-67. (61 ref)
Burlew carries this journal

3. 2009139524 NLM Unique Identifier: 16601511.
Newhouse RP.
Evidence and the executive. Selecting measures for safety and quality
improvement initiatives.
Journal of Nursing Administration. 2006 Mar; 36(3): 109-13. (27 ref)
Burlew carries this journal

4.2009157318 NLM Unique Identifier: 16553707.
Elliott R. McKinley S. Aitken L.
Adoption of a sedation scoring system and sedation guideline in an
intensive care unit.
Journal of Advanced Nursing. 2006 Apr; 54(2): 208-16. (23 ref)
Burlew has some years.

Create Change Website: the changing environment of digitial scholarhship

The Create Change Website, a resource on scholarly communication issues, has been updated to provide faculty with current information, perspectives, and tools that enable them to play an active role in advancing scholarly information exchange in the networked environment. The new Create Change Website is based on the idea that the ways faculty share and use academic research results are changing rapidly and irreversibly. The Website includes sections on digital scholarship and new modes of communication, examples of change in diverse fields, and ways to stay informed about new developments.

The National Nurse Team invites you to email teri@nationalnurse.info to receive this free poster. You will need an Adobe Reader program on your computer to open and print this.

Also, please consider stopping by the National Nurse Cafe Press website to purchase a button, bear, mousepad, poster, bumper sticker or mug. There is a very small profit margin for the National Nurse Campaign but these extra dollars help with long distance phone calls, the email newsletter data base, and printing and mailing costs. Your small contributions are helping to keep this effort strong.

HR 4903 is a 100% grassroots effort which means the campaign is not being run by "professional" lobbyists or organizations. Even our book keeper, accountant, and webmasters are volunteers. The team hired a lawyer and formed the National Nursing Network Organization; this is now a non-profit coorporation and not tax-exempt, so contributions are not tax-deductible. The rationale for doing this is to keep the campaign "clean" and also to assure that the team may lobby legally.

Teri, Alisa, and Terri cannot thank you enough for all of the supportive emails, comments, and suggestions. Nursing is TEAMWORK, and when we work together, we deliver the best care to assure positive outcomes for our patients; in this case it will be the American public!

George Mason University Students Defend HR 4903

Pictured left to right or counter clockwise are Professor Brenda Sheingold,Carla Stemmer, Dane Sehnert, Suzanne Arbogast and Alexis McPoland

The National Nurse Team received this report from Leesburg, Virgina. On Thursday, June 29, 2006, the George Mason University Master of Science in Nursing class, Organization of Nursing and Health Care Delivery Systems, gave mock Congressional testimony regarding the nursing shortage with actions to remedy it. One group representing patients, spoke in strong support of The National Nurse Act of 2006 and encouraged all in attendance to contact their representatives and spread the word to their colleagues. In attendance were senior leaders of the Inova Health System, Karen Drenkard, David Goldberg and Patrick Walters. This healthcare system is located in Northern Virginia. Members of the class were surprised that they had not heard of HR 4903 and vowed to promote it using handouts provided by the National Nurse Team and this web page. The class is taught by Brenda Sheingold, RN, MSOD who uses many innovative teaching techniques when instructing her students.