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NEWS:
Nurse Finds Her Niche - New Faculty Member Will Help Create a Psychiatric-Mental Health Specialization in UCI’s D.N.P. Program
It was during her last rotation as a nursing student, at an outpatient program for severely mentally ill patients, that Dawn Bounds found her calling. Now, as she begins a new journey as an assistant professor in UCI’s Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, she reflects on those early days.
“I absolutely loved it – to sit and talk with my patients and really try to understand the context of their lives and how they could be supported,” recalls the Chicago native. “It was such an enjoyable experience that from that moment on I knew that I’d be specializing in psychiatry.”
Bounds, who had been expected to go into medical-surgical nursing, instead took a position in an inpatient child and adolescent psychiatry unit right after graduation. Being in such a challenging environment came naturally to her – so much so that she used to joke she’d return after she retired. Bounds worked there while
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Improving Hospital Nurse Staffing Is Associated with Fewer Deaths from Sepsis
According to a new study published in American Journal of Infection Control, improving nurse staffing as proposed in pending legislation in New York state would likely save lives of sepsis patients and save money by reducing the length of hospital stays.
Researchers at the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, conducting independent research on whether pending nurse staffing legislation in New York state is in the public’s interest, found that the wide variation in patient-to-nurse ratios across hospitals in New York is contributing to avoidable deaths for patients with sepsis, a common, high mortality condition.
New York state is a national leader in sepsis care through legislation known as Rory’s Regulations named after a child that unexpectedly died in a New York hospital from sepsis. The new study finds avoide
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A Safety Precautions Protocol Reduces Self-Harm For At-Risk Patients In The Emergency Department
Emergency department (ED) boarding of patients with psychiatric illness is a critical issue.(1) These patients are twice as likely as medical patients to require inpatient admission and five times more likely to board (waiting for more than a set number of hours – often 4 hours – for an inpatient bed).(2)
A new study in the January 2021 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, “Keeping Patients at Risk for Self-Harm Safe in the Emergency Department: A Protocolized Approach,” by Abigail L. Donovan, MD, and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, describes the implementation of a comprehensive safety precautions protocol for ED patients at risk for self-harm.
A multidisciplinary team developed the protocol to include several comprehensive safety precautions, including:
- Creating safe bathrooms
- Increasing the number and training of observers
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New Virtual Education Guide to Help Students with Disabilities
As millions of students with disabilities and their parents head into the winter months of this pandemic and continued fluctuations between in-person, hybrid and remote learning, the national disability inclusion nonprofit RespectAbility is offering free resources with new updates to support students with disabilities during this crisis.
The updated guide, entitled Virtual Education & Students with Disabilities: Supporting Student Success in the Time of COVID-19 and Beyond, is available for free on RespectAbility’s website at:
www.respectability.org/virtual-education/
The guide covers critical topics such as virtual resources from a wide range of disability advocacy organizations, home-based programs for students of all ages, live synchronous learning opportunities, social-emotional and mental health resources and state-specific information for parents of students with disabilities.