Effects of a Peer Evaluation Technique on Nursing Students\u27 Anxiety Levels

The rigorous educational experience of nursing school can cause stress and anxiety for nursing students. Identifying techniques to help decrease stress and anxiety during a nursing program can be beneficial to the students’ overall health and mental well-being as well as to their academic success. A quasi-experimental design was utilized to examine if a peer evaluation technique (PET) during clinical skill practice sessions decreases anxiety prior to the students’ skill performance evaluation with nursing faculty. The State Trait Anxiety Inventory questionnaire was utilized to measure anxiety levels. The difference in post state anxiety scores between the control group (M = 44.6, SD = 13.4) and the experimental group (M = 39.4, SD = 9.2) did not indicate statistical significance; t(42.6) = -1.6, p = .12. A relationship was not found between state anxiety levels prior to skill performance evaluation with nursing faculty and participant characteristics such as age, gender, overall grade point average, ethnicity, or previous certification or licensure. Several limitations included a small convenience sample, lack of ethnic diversity among participants, limited timeframe, and possible sharing of experiences between participants. Future research opportunities to examine the effectiveness of PET include increasing sample size, increasing timeframe and number of clinical skills, and utilizing multiple sites or cohorts. This study adds to the body of literature on strategies to reduce nursing students’ anxiety during clinical skill performance

Heart failure nursing in Australia: Challenges, strengths, and opportunities

Australia has a land mass similar to the United States of America, supporting a population of just over 20 million, which is distributed predominantly across the coastal perimeter. The Australian society is rich in cultural diversity fostered by decades of migration. Both these factors present challenges for health care. First, because resources are scare in rural and remote regions, health outcomes are poorer in these regions, especially among indigenous populations. Second, the cultural diversity of Australians is a challenge to providing evidence-based treatment recommendations. In Australia, in parallel with international trends, there is a strong association between socioeconomic status, chronic conditions, and health outcomes

The looking-glass of empire : early feminist interrogation of the colonial patriarchy, 1850-1950

This thesis contends that there is a substantial body of protofeminist and feminist fiction by colonial women writers which offers a critique of imperialism; indeed, because it challenges white male discourse in an imperial setting and in the domestic setting of the ‘home’ colony, it shares many characteristics with postcolonial literatures. Close textual study of examples from this body of writing from the white settler colonies and from India reveals that colonial feminists countered masculinist discourse in four closely imbricated areas: gender, race, class, and history. Central to the development of this genre, which is assessed against Elaine Showalter’s study of the female literary tradition, is the female adaptation of the male Bildun^sroman as a means of challenging patriarchal constructions of womanhood. These were founded on the scopophilic gaze and symbolized in art and literature through the mirror as icon of transgressive female behaviour. The thesis is organized chronologically, and, over the period under discussion, colonial feminist writers move from expressing their preoccupation with female entrapment within the male gaze to assertions of female nationhood in which a fresh sense of the female self is constructed through the medium of writing, rather than through the looking-glass. Although links are recognized between the writing of white colonial feminists and postcolonial literatures, few studies have undertaken a comprehensive examination of white women’s literature across the empire as a whole. The thesis confirms the presence of oppositional white voices during the colonial era and points to ways in which colonial women’s writing can be regarded as a cohesive corpus which builds from generation to generation

Independent and reciprocal accommodation in anisometropic amblyopia

Accommodation is considered to be a symmetrical response and to be driven by the least ametropic and nonamblyopic eye in anisometropia. We report the case of a 4-year-old child with anisometropic amblyopia who accommodates asymmetrically, reliably demonstrating normal accommodation in the nonamblyopic eye and antiaccommodation of the amblyopic eye to near targets. The abnormal accommodation of the amblyopic eye remained largely unchanged during 7 subsequent testing sessions undertaken over the course of therapy. We suggest that a congenital dysinnervation syndrome may result in relaxation of accommodation in relation to near cues and might be a hitherto unconsidered additional etiological factor in anisometropic amblyopia

Coastline Kriging: A Bayesian Approach

Statistical interpolation of chemical concentrations at new locations is an important step in assessing a worker's exposure level. When measurements are available from coastlines, as is the case in coastal clean-up operations in oil spills, one may need a mechanism to carry out spatial interpolation at new locations along the coast. In this paper we present a simple model for analyzing spatial data that is observed over a coastline. We demonstrate four different models using two different representations of the coast using curves. The four models were demonstrated on simulated data and one of them was also demonstrated on a dataset from the GuLF STUDY. Our contribution here is to offer practicing hygienists and exposure assessors with a simple and easy method to implement Bayesian hierarchical models for analyzing and interpolating coastal chemical concentrations

New York’s Professor John R. Nolon: A National Leader in Land Use Law with a Large Impact Across the Hudson Valley and the State of New York

As Professor John R. Nolon steps down from active law teaching, this article reflects not only on his contributions as a national thought leader in the field, but also on how he has a hand in changing the land use and conservation patterns in New York while promoting affordable housing and combating discrimination

Role of home visiting in improving parenting and health in families at risk of abuse and neglect : results of a multicentre randomised controlled trial and economic evaluation

Objectives – To evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of an intensive home visiting programme in improving outcomes for vulnerable families. Design – Multicentre randomised controlled trial in which eligible women were allocated to receive home visiting (n=67) or standard services (n=64). Incremental cost analysis. Setting – 40 GP practices across two counties in the UK Participants – 131 vulnerable pregnant women. Intervention: Selected health visitors were trained in the Family Partnership Model to provide a weekly home visiting service from 6-months antenatally to 12 months postnatally. Main outcome measures – mother-child interaction, maternal psychological health attitudes and behaviour, infant functioning and development, and risk of neglect or abuse. Results – At 12-months differences favouring the home visited group were observed on an independent assessment of maternal sensitivity (p<0.04) and infant cooperativeness (p<0.02). No differences were identified on any other measures. There was a non-significant increase in the likelihood of intervention group infants being the subject of child protection proceedings, or being removed from the home, and one death in the control group. The mean incremental cost per infant of the home visiting intervention was £3,246 (bootstrapped 95% confidence interval for the difference: £1,645 - £4,803). Conclusion – This intervention may have the potential to improve parenting and increase the identification of infants at risk of abuse and neglect in vulnerable families. Further investigation is needed together with long term follow up to assess possible sleeper effects