American journal of critical care : an official publication, American Association of Critical-Care Nurses
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Health care professionals experience workplace stress, which may lead to impaired physical and mental health, job turnover, and burnout. Resilience allows people to handle stress positively. Little research is aimed at finding interventions to improve resilience in health care professionals. ⋯ Institutions could facilitate access to peer discussions and social interactions to promote resilience. Highly impactful resources with low utilization could be targets for improved access. Differences in utilization and impact between groups suggest that varied interventions would be necessary to reach all individuals.
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Benefit to Family Members of Delivering Hand Massage With Essential Oils to Critically Ill Patients.
In intensive care environments, patients' families are often encouraged to participate in their loved one's care; however, many family members feel anxious, depressed, and unsure about how to help patients. ⋯ Administering a brief hand massage using pleasant-smelling oils to patients in an intensive care unit may reduce anxiety of family members who administer the treatment.
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Comparative Study
Scoring Systems for Outcome Prediction in a Cardiac Surgical Intensive Care Unit: A Comparative Study.
Most scoring systems used to predict clinical outcome in critical care were not designed for application in cardiac surgery patients. ⋯ CASUS can be recommended as the most reliable and beneficial option for benchmarking and risk stratification in cardiac surgery patients.
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Critically ill patients who need mechanical ventilation require endotracheal suctioning. Guidelines recommend coarse crackles over the trachea and/or the presence of a sawtooth pattern on the flow-volume loop of the ventilator waveform as the best indicators. ⋯ Patients receiving mechanical ventilation should be routinely assessed for coarse crackles over the trachea, the most common indicator for endotracheal suctioning. Despite common practice, assessment of lung sounds to identify the need for suctioning is not supported.
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Maintaining oral hygiene is a key component of preventing ventilator-associated pneumonia; however, practices are inconsistent. ⋯ The content and dissemination method of institutional guidelines on oral hygiene do influence the oral hygiene practices of critical care nurses. Future studies examining how institutional guidelines could best be incorporated into routine workflow are needed.