International emergency nursing
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Multicenter Study
The emergency department "carousel": an ethnographically-derived model of the dynamics of patient flow.
Emergency department (ED) overcrowding reduces efficiency and increases the risk of medical error leading to adverse events. Technical solutions and models have done little to redress this. A full year's worth of ethnographic observations of patient flow were undertaken, which involved making hand-written field-notes of the communication and activities of emergency clinicians (doctors and nurses), in two EDs in Sydney, Australia. ⋯ The carousel model uniquely integrates diagnosis, treatment and transfer of individual patients with the intellectual labour of leading and coordinating the department. The latter involves managing staff skill mix and the allocation of patients to particular ED sub-departments. The model extends traditional patient flow representations and underlines the importance of valuing ethnographic methods in health services research, in order to foster organisational learning, and generate creative practical and policy alternatives that may, for example, reduce or ameliorate access block and ED overcrowding.
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To determine whether reported attitudes towards patients who attend A&E following self-harm extend to young people. ⋯ Further research is required which considers attitudes of emergency care practitioners within the context of emergency care work, and which investigates whether being a young person per se has an influence on attitudes.
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High quality clinical decision-making (CDM) has been highlighted as a priority across the nursing profession. Triage nurses, in the Accident and Emergency (A&E) department, work in considerable levels of uncertainty and require essential skills including: critical thinking, evaluation and decision-making. ⋯ Having an awareness of how judgements and decisions are made is argued as essential, in a time where traditional nurse boundaries and responsibilities are never more challenged. It is hoped that the paper not only raises this awareness in general but also, in particular, engages the triage nurse to look more critically at how they make their own decisions in their everyday practice.
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The development of the Swedish ambulance service has resulted in three different competence levels in Swedish ambulance teams: specialist ambulance nurses, registered nurses and emergency medical technicians. A nursing scientific model developed by Peplau (Peplau, H., 1991. Interpersonal Relations in Nursing. ⋯ Furthermore, the results show that the parts of each phase can vary depending on the patient's condition and the environmental circumstances of the ambulance mission. This improved understanding of the four phases of the pre-hospital nurse-patient relationship, and their parts, could be used by ambulance team members as a support during the pre-hospital caring process in ambulance missions. This new knowledge could also be used in education.