Implementing Charge Nurse Professional Development Training

Background: At a suburban hospital, training for charge nurses was not standardized. Department-based orientation varied without centralized guiding principles, and no internal opportunities for professional development training specific to the charge nurse role. The role and responsibilities of charge nurses had grown ambiguous with varied interpretation and implementation across the hospital. Leading to impeded workflow, employee engagement, and the inability to provide adequate clinical support to staff, clinicians, and patients. It was evident that the role needed to be supported better with clear expectations and standardized professional development training. With hospital and union leadership ardently in support of this program, improvements to the charge nurse position were crucial with high stakes outcomes. Methods: Informed by experience and a review of best practices found in literature, a team of nurses, including union representatives, educators, and managers, convened to work on role development and training design. The work entailed an assessment of current practice and best practice recommendations, development of a standardized charge nurse curriculum, determining workshop design and learner-centered content delivery methods, and implementation. Results: Successful implementation of charge nurse professional development training program; however, a low response rate for post-workshop evaluations resulted in outcomes that were not generalizable. Results showed an improvement in perceived understanding of the charge nurse role and responsibilities as well as satisfaction with internal professional development opportunities. Conclusions: Long-term impact on hospital outcomes yet to be assessed. Initial results concluded the program was a success. The content met the learner’s expectations and appeared to enhance role clarity. Plans to role program out hospital-wide are underway

Working for Another World: Geographies of Labor, Aspiration and Kinship in the Northwest African Corridor

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Senegalese migration to and through Morocco. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming legal and political landscape and narrowing prospects for migrants trying to get to Europe, I explore the dynamics of settlement and permanence for migrant Senegalese women who live in low-income neighborhoods in the urban peripheries of Morocco, becoming landlords, lenders, and trade partners for a wider population of transient migrant men. As emplaced nodes in historically constituted networks of Islamic Sufi pilgrimage and trans-Saharan trade, these women’s uneven experiences of (im)mobility shed light on the contemporary re-positioning of Morocco within multiple competing globalizing orders — European, African, and Islamic. I examine how these different imaginaries shape women’s strategies of residence and livelihood, and how these environments meanwhile become stages for their experimentation on sexuality, kinship, and alliance. Ethnographically, it centers on a population of older uncoupled women migrants — divorcées, widows, second wives, and unmarried women — who use travel to Morocco to re-negotiate their positions on the fragile margins of the kinship order. I argue that in becoming ‘emplaced’ in Morocco, as landlords, lenders, and wage earners, they are involved in re-drawing the terms of sexual independence and personal accumulation within new boundaries of respectability. At the same time, as they attempt to concretize openings and gains for themselves as well as the wider population of young migrant men, they are transforming urban life by contributing to an infrastructure that reproduces possibilities for both mobility and permanence. Dismantling the dualistic framing of these terms as transparently opposed, this research shows how women’s experiences of deferred, suspended, or uncertain mobility creates conditions for the reinvention of space and relatedness

"By My Heart": Gerald Vizenor's Almost Ashore and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point

Gerald Vizenor's 2006 publications Almost Ashore and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point illuminate Anishinaabe nationhood, citizenship, and self-determiniation through an ironic transnational framework constituted from a particular landscape, set of stories, relationships, and memory.  Through the apparatus of poetry, and specifically through the lens of "by my heart" (a phrase that echoes through Vizenor's collections), Vizenor reveals Anishinaabeg determining the locales and ideals of the nation, despite discourses of dominance that would preordain and reduce Anishinaabe experience to an urban/reservation dichotomy and normalize colonial conquest

Chasms and Collisions: Native American Women's Decolonial Labor

“[My basket narratives] weave old forms of articulation with new forms of iconography to create a collision, which echoes the cultural experience of my life.” --Sarah Sense“I have always felt there is a significant chasm that divides Native people from non-Natives…that began at first contact and continues to this day.”   --Shan GoshornIn this article, I argue Native American visual artists understand and characterize the fallout of the project of “cultural simulations” that preoccupy systems of continued colonial occupation in the Americas.  As suggested in the above quotes, Native aritsts are attentive to Indigenous visualities that trouble settler colonial designs of signifying the indian -- visualities that are hyper-aware of settler colonial methods of reading Native subjects by binding them to metrics of authenticity.  What’s more, their works record Indigenous subjects not as static representations but as dynamic, living peoples that have complicated relationships to the settler state; each of her “visual records” is not a document of closure but is a decolonizing blueprint fortified by the vitality of Indigenous lived experience.   The “chasm” of misunderstanding about which Eastern Band Cherokee artist Shan Goshorn argues and the “collision” of cultural expressions about which Choctaw/Chitimacha artist Sarah Sense describes provides a way of thinking about artistic renderings of lived experience for Native women -- decolonized expressions that critically and creatively reckon with both the chasm and collision of historical and contemporary genocidal terror.  The labor of reckoning which Sense and Goshorn take on in their works recognizes that the invention of cultural simulations is the specter of white desire – a necessary fiction which protects and projects white innocence from the on-going project of cultural genocide.   If the willful work of settler historical amnesia (erasure) must be coupled with inflexible symbolic violence (invention) for the project of colonialism to continue and thrive, then the tribally specific (from the ground up) labor of Native artists must also be commensurate with the hemispheric/global Indigenous connective tissue (lateral) of Native women’s work against all forms of violence and oppression.  It seems to me that dimension best addresses the oblate nature of discursive dominance, and it seems to me that Sense and Goshorn are entirely aware of just tha

Cysteine-modifying agents: a possible approach for effective anticancer and antiviral drugs.

Modification of cysteine residues in proteins, due to a) the participation of the thiol moiety of this amino acid in oxido-reduction reactions, b) its ability to strongly coordinate transition metal ions, or c) its nucleophilic nature and facile reaction with electrophiles, may be critically important for the design of novel types of pharmacological agents. Application of such procedures recently led to the design of novel antivirals, mainly based on the reaction of zinc finger proteins with disulfides and related derivatives. This approach was particularly successful for developing novel antiviral agents for human immunodeficiency virus and human papilloma virus. Several new anticancer therapeutic approaches, mainly targeting tubulin, have also been reported. Thus, this unique amino acid offers very interesting possibilities for developing particularly useful pharmacological agents, which generally possess a completely different mechanism of action compared with classic agents in clinical use, thus avoiding major problems such as multidrug resistance (for antiviral and anticancer agents) or high toxicity

Presence of papillomavirus sequences in condylomatous lesions of the mamillae and in invasive carcinoma of the breast

BACKGROUND: Viruses including Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), a human equivalent of murine mammary tumour virus (MMTV) and human papillomavirus (HPV) have been implicated in the aetiology of human breast cancer. We report the presence of HPV DNA sequences in areolar tissue and tumour tissue samples from female patients with breast carcinoma. The presence of virus in the areolar–nipple complex suggests to us a potential pathogenic mechanism. METHODS: Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was undertaken to amplify HPV types in areolar and tumour tissue from breast cancer cases. In situ hybridisation supported the PCR findings and localised the virus in nipple, areolar and tumour tissue. RESULTS: Papillomavirus DNA was present in 25 of 29 samples of breast carcinoma and in 20 of 29 samples from the corresponding mamilla. The most prevalent type in both carcinomas and nipples was HPV 11, followed by HPV 6. Other types detected were HPV 16, 23, 27 and 57 (nipples and carcinomas), HPV 20, 21, 32, 37, 38, 66 and GA3-1 (nipples only) and HPV 3, 15, 24, 87 and DL473 (carcinomas only). Multiple types were demonstrated in seven carcinomas and ten nipple samples. CONCLUSIONS: The data demonstrate the occurrence of HPV in nipple and areolar tissues in patients with breast carcinoma. The authors postulate a retrograde ductular pattern of viral spread that may have pathogenic significance