Nurse students’ competences in interprofessional pharmaceutical care in Europe: cross-sectional evaluation

Background: Safe pharmaceutical care requires competent nurses with specific knowledge, skills and attitudes. It is unclear whether nursing students are adequately prepared to perform pharmaceutical care in practice. Mapping their pharmaceutical care competences can lead to a better understanding of the extent to which curricula fit expectations of the labour market. Objectives: To assess pharmaceutical care competences of final-year nursing students of different educational levels. Design: A cross-sectional survey design. Settings: In 14 European countries, nursing schools who offer curricula for level 4 to 7 students, were approached. Participants: Through convenience sampling 1741 final-year student nurses of level 4 to 7 were included. Sampling strategies were country-specific. Methods: A web-platform was developed with an assessment of the level in which students mastered pharmaceutical care competences. Knowledge questions, case studies (basic/advanced level), self-reported practical skills and attitudes were evaluated. Results: Mean scores for knowledge questions differed significantly (p<0.001) between level 5 (56/100), level 6 (68/100) and level 7 students (72/100). For basic cases level 5 students reached lower scores (64/100) compared with level 6 (71/100) and level 7 (72/100) students (p=0.002 and p=0.005). For more advanced cases no difference between levels was observed (overall mean 61/100). Most students (63-90%) considered themselves skilled to perform pharmaceutical care and had positive attitudes towards their participation in pharmaceutical care (65-97%). Conclusions: Relatively low knowledge scores were calculated for final-year student nurses. In some domains, lower levels of students might be insufficiently prepared to take up responsibilities in pharmaceutical care. Our assessment can be used as a tool for educators to evaluate how prepared nursing students are for pharmaceutical care. Its further implementation for students of different educational levels will allow benchmarking between the levels, both within and between countries.This work was supported by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union [grant number 2018-1-BE02-KA203-046861] and Consensus accountants, an accountancy service in Belgium that financially supported the Belgian authors, without any conflicts of interest

Nectar intake and foraging efficiency: the responses of sunbirds to flower morphology

Floral traits vary greatly between plant species, and determine which pollinators are physically capable of accessing floral rewards and carrying out effective pollination. Research on the responses of nectarivorous birds to different flower morphologies has been largely restricted to hummingbirds, while other flower specialists, the sunbirds and honeyeaters, remain relatively unstudied. We investigated how flower morphology influences the foraging behaviour of White-bellied Sunbirds, Cinnyris talatala. Using artificial flowers made of clear polyvinyl chloride tubing and filled with 20% w/w sucrose solution, we measured maximum extraction depths of sunbirds foraging at 3- and 5-mm-wide flowers at both upward and downward orientations. Flower width, but not orientation, strongly influenced maximum extraction depth, with the birds probing deeper at wider flowers. Foraging bout dynamics were tested at these two diameters and at two corolla lengths, 14 and 27 mm; birds fed faster at wider and at shorter flowers, when length and diameter were tested separately. In combination treatments, sunbirds fed fastest at the short and narrow flowers where the fixed volume of nectar was easier to reach. When given a choice between two floral lengths or two floral diameters, birds preferred short flowers, with diameter having no effect. Floral length appears to be more important than width in determining sunbird foraging behaviour, and White-bellied Sunbirds should be effective pollinators of short tubular flowers. The lack of effect of orientation is perhaps surprising when many sunbird-pollinated plants have downward-facing flowers.The South African National Research Foundation and the University of Pretoria.http://link.springer.com/journal/103362019-10-01hj2018Zoology and Entomolog