Patient and family partner involvement in staff interviews: Designing, implementing, and evaluating a new hiring process

Healthcare organizations in Canada and the United States are seeking to enhance their ability to offer patient and family centred care (PFCC). One aspect of PFCC is the participation of Patient and Family Partners (PFPs) in a variety of roles within healthcare organizations. This article describes the creation and evaluation of a hiring process that utilized a PFCC interview tool (PFCCIT) and collaborated with PFPs in interviewing candidates for healthcare positions. An evaluation of the new hiring process was designed, including an on-line survey of candidates and semi-structured interviews with healthcare leaders and PFPs. Survey results indicated candidates felt the new process helped them understand the importance of PFCC at the organization. In interviews with leaders, comments were overwhelmingly positive, with leaders urging the spread of this hiring process throughout the organization. Similarly, the four PFPs who were interviewed felt their participation was valuable, and useful in furthering the organization’s commitment to PFCC. The implementation of a staff hiring process utilizing PFPs and the PFCCIT provides a valuable tool for healthcare organizations working to enhance PFCC to better meet the needs of their patients and families. Further study is required to validate the long-term impact of this initiative and determine whether it improves recruitment and retention of staff sharing the organization’s commitment to PFCC

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Bibliography: p. 84-95Some pages are in colour

Nurses' attitudes towards the care of the dying

Terminally ill patients and their families describe hospital care as nonsupportive to their needs during the final phase of life. Nurses generally are not comfortable with a supportive role when caring for the dying and tend to adhere to a curative role. The purpose of this descriptive, correlational study therefore was to describe the attitudes of general staff nurses working on medical-surgical units in hospitals towards the care of the dying and to ascertain the relationship between these attitudes and the education and experience of the nurses. An adaptation of the model for role episode, conflict, and ambiguity by Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek and Rosenthal (1964) was the applied theoretical framework. The sample consisted of 197 randomly selected registered nurses employed full or part-time on general adult medical-surgical hospital units in British Columbia. The majority of the sample were married, Protestant females, between the ages of 26 and 45 years who were prepared at the diploma level in nursing. The mean length of time worked as a nurse was 8.5 years with a mean of 7.5 years on medical-surgical units. Attitudes towards the care of the dying were generally ambiguous, neither negative nor positive as measured by scores obtained on the ‘Questionnaire for Understanding the Dying Person and His Family’. Additionally, half the respondents did not believe that nurses should be the primary health care professionals equipped to deal with the emotional reactions of the dying yet three-quarters of the sample believed that patients turned to nurses to discuss such emotional issues. Data revealed that close to two-thirds of the respondents had received structured death and dying content in their basic nursing education yet less than half furthered their death and dying education since graduation. Overall death education for the sample was low. A small positive correlation (r=-0.26) was found between respondents' death education and their attitudes towards the care of the dying; no significant association was found between respondents' level of general nursing education and their attitudes. Although there was variability in the amount of professional and personal death experience, over half of the respondents experienced between one and three terminally ill patient deaths on their medical-surgical units per month. Additionally, the majority of respondents had experienced the death of an immediate family member. Overall death experience was low to moderate. A small, but significant positive correlation (r=0.24) was found between overall death experience and attitudes' towards the care of the dying; no significant association was found between general experience and attitude. Findings suggest that supportive nursing care is not being demonstrated with dying patients and their families. However, the influencing natures of death education and death experience on nurses' attitudes are positive, thereby providing the nursing profession with two possible ways of positively influencing nurses' attitudes to the care of the dying.Applied Science, Faculty ofNursing, School ofGraduat

Terms of Silence: Weaknesses in Corporate and Law Enforcement Responses to Cyberviolence against Girls

Girls do not need merely to be empowered with technological know-how in order to engage fully online. While girls use digital and social media for self-expression, activism, and identity experimentation, their engagement is too often interfered with by online gender policing and by being attacked for daring to challenge conventional stereotypes. Reshaping the online environment in ways that address this discrimination meaningfully requires a multifaceted approach that includes transparent, responsive, and accessible redress through both social media platforms and, where necessary, law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, these institutions all too often fail to respond adequately when girls report acts of cyberviolence committed against them. This article illustrates this failure by drawing on lessons learned from coauthor Julie S. Lalonde’s experiences in advocating online for gender equality. It also raises the troubling concern of law enforcement deference to corporate terms of service rather than to Canadian law