What Has Happened to Named Nursing? Perceptions of the Named Nurse System

The purpose of this study was to explore the previously little researched area of the implementation of the Named Nurse Standard in hospital settings. The Standard formed part of the Government's programme of health service reforms that aimed to enhance the patient experience by having an identified nurse in charge of their care from admission to discharge. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to identify whether nursing work was organised to facilitate the named nurse concept and the patient's perception of who delivered their care. A case study approach in surgical wards in two NHS trusts enabled comparison of clinical settings with a high adherence to the Standard's criteria and wards with a low adherence. The areas selected for comparison were the methods of organising nursing work, nurses' perceptions of the Named Nurse Standard and the patient's experience of the named nurse role. The results show that, although levels of patient satisfaction were high, this was not associated with care from a named nurse. There was no significant difference between the methods of organising nursing work on the wards in the two adherence categories. Furthermore, the Named Nurse Standard was not fully implemented on any of the wards sampled. The main recommendation of this study is that innovations in nursing practice should be evaluated in a pilot study before being introduced nationally. Areas recommended for future research in the organisation of nursing work include day case units and discharge planning

Restricted Differentiation Potential of Progenitor Cell Populations Obtained From the Equine Superficial Digital Flexor Tendon (SDFT)

ABSTRACT: The aim of this study was to characterize stem and progenitor cell populations from the equine superficial digital flexor tendon, an energy-storing tendon with similarities to the human Achilles tendon, which is frequently injured. Using published methods for the isolation of tendon-derived stem/progenitor cells by low-density plating we found that isolated cells possessed clonogenicity but were unable to fully differentiate towards mesenchymal lineages using trilineage differentiation assays. In particular, adipogenic differentiation appeared to be restricted, as assessed by Oil Red O staining of stem/progenitor cells cultured in adipogenic medium. We then assessed whether differential adhesion to fibronectin substrates could be used to isolate a population of cells with broader differentiation potential. However we found little difference in the stem and tenogenic gene expression profile of these cells as compared to tenocytes, although the expression of thrombospondin-4 was significantly reduced in hypoxic conditions. Tendon-derived stem/progenitor cells isolated by differential adhesion to fibronectin had a similar differentiation potential to cells isolated by low density plating, and when grown in either normoxic or hypoxic conditions. In summary, we have found a restricte