Assessing Undergraduate Nursing Students\u27 Knowledge, Attitudes and Cultural Competence in Caring for LGBT Patients

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) patients experience barriers to health care that include fear of discrimination and limited access to providers knowledgeable about and sensitive to the LGBT population and their specific health needs. This study examined the effectiveness of an educational intervention conducted at Illinois Wesleyan University designed to improve knowledge level and attitudes of nursing students toward LGBT patient care. The educational intervention focused on key terminology, health disparities, medical needs of transgender patients and culturally sensitive communication skills necessary for competent LGBT patient care. Knowledge level and attitudes were evaluated before and after the educational intervention using a survey based on a modified Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men Scale, and two assessment tools developed for this study. The results of this study showed both an improvement in attitudes and an increase in knowledge level directly after the educational intervention. Implications of this study support the inclusion of content related to LGBT patient healthcare into undergraduate nursing curricula to enhance knowledge as well as to promote cultural competence and sensitivity

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead