Effect of a Workplace Walking Initiative to Decrease Telehealth Nurses\u27 Fatigue

Abstract Background: Fatigue has been a common problem in the nursing profession. To date, most of the research regarding nurse fatigue has focused on nurses working in hospitals. Minimal research has been completed examining fatigue among nurses working in the telehealth environment and the effects of an evidence-based workplace initiative to decrease fatigue. Aim: The aim of this translational project was to describe the overall self-reported health and fatigue for a group of telehealth nurses and to evaluate the effectiveness of the American Heart Association’s (AHA) walking program in improving overall health status and decreasing fatigue in telehealth nurses. Methods: The project evaluated a sample of 49 telehealth nurses’ health status and fatigue before and after the implementation of the AHA’s workplace walking program. The participants were asked to walk three times a week for at least 20 minutes, logging the date, time, and distance walked using a pedometer. The project participants overall health status and fatigue were measured using the SF-36 Questionnaire, Fatigue Assessment Scale (FAS), and the Fatigue Severity Scale pre- and post-implementation of the walking program. Results: The study did demonstrate that a walking program can be an effective countermeasure for fatigue. The study demonstrated an impact on total fatigue, along with the number of minutes walked effected fatigue and fatigue exhibited a decrease over the 4 week walking time period. Implications: Nurses working in the telehealth role experience very different sources of work-related fatigue, including prolonged sitting and computer work. Fatigue Counter Measurement Programs in nursing, such as this walking initiative need to be developed and implemented for nurses working in the call center work environment

Honesty admits discourse : lying in the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell

Variously deemed a motif, an image or a puzzling preoccupation, lying links all of Elizabeth Gaskell's works, and its political implications are far more important than critics have recognized. Lying, this dissertation argues, is the key that opens up Gaskell's values, purposes, and methods, including her own linguistic shifts and suppressions. Moreover, twentieth-century theorists of discourse and power such as Foucault and Bakhtin have helped locate lying as one of the linguistic tools for expressing and dealing with cultural change. For Gaskell, lying does not represent a turning away from truth but an expansion of the grounds for truth. Examination of the lies in her six major novels and many of her shorter works confirms that Gaskell was interrogating current assumptions of truth by encouraging inspection of motives and reinterpretation of values