New Graduate Orientation Evaluation: Are There Any Best Practices Out There?”

In the current nursing shortage, a time when healthcare needs to get innovative with hiring and retaining new graduate nurses, orientation can be a factor in a new graduate’s decision to leave their place of employment. Efficient, cost effective, and safe orientations with clear expectations are necessary, including orientation evaluation. There is, however, little guidance in the literature on best practices for completing an orientation evaluation. Although scarce, innovations and evidence do exist, as do research opportunities, and those are discussed during this presentation. The purpose of this project was to describe, based on the literature, current evidence that seeks to inform best practices to objectively evaluate orientation progress and completion

The Center for Nursing Research and Quality Outcomes

10 Year Anniversary Book of Research, Magnet Conference and Quality Improvement Project Abstracts, 2010-2020: Index. Cover and Table of Contents published separately.https://knowledgeconnection.mainehealth.org/annualreports/1010/thumbnail.jp

The Center for Nursing Research and Quality Outcomes

10 Year Anniversary Book of Research, Magnet Conference and Quality Improvement Project Abstracts, 2010-2020: Cover and Table of Contents. Index published separately.https://knowledgeconnection.mainehealth.org/annualreports/1009/thumbnail.jp

Dos and don’ts for mHealth-based clinical support among clinicians in South Africa: Results from a 1-day workshop

Digital technologies continue to penetrate the South African (SA) healthcare sector at an increasing rate. Clinician-to-clinician diagnostic and management assistance through mHealth is expanding rapidly, reducing professional isolation and unnecessary referrals, and promoting better patient outcomes and more equitable healthcare systems. However, the widespread uptake of mHealth use raises ethical concerns around patient autonomy and safety, and guidance for healthcare workers around the ethical use of mHealth is needed. This article presents the results of a multi-stakeholder workshop at which the ‘dos and don’ts’ pertaining to mHealth ethics in the SA context were formulated and aligned to seven basic recommendations derived from the literature and previous multistakeholder, multi-country meetings

Septal Oxytocin Administration Impairs Peer Affiliation via V1a Receptors in Female Meadow Voles

The peptide hormone oxytocin (OT) plays an important role in social behaviors, including social bond formation. In different contexts, however, OT is also associated with aggression, social selectivity, and reduced affiliation. Female meadow voles form social preferences for familiar same-sex peers under short, winter-like day lengths in the laboratory, and provide a means of studying affiliation outside the context of reproductive pair bonds. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the actions of OT in the lateral septum (LS) may decrease affiliative behavior, including greater density of OT receptors in the LS of meadow voles that huddle less. We infused OT into the LS of female meadow voles immediately prior to cohabitation with a social partner to determine its effects on partner preference formation. OT prevented the formation of preferences for the partner female. Co-administration of OT with a specific OT receptor antagonist did not reverse the effect, but co-administration of OT with a specific vasopressin 1a receptor (V1aR) antagonist did, indicating that OT in the LS likely acted through V1aRs to decrease partner preference. Receptor autoradiography revealed dense V1aR binding in the LS of female meadow voles. These results suggest that the LS is a brain region that may be responsible for inhibitory effects of OT administration on affiliation, which will be important to consider in therapeutic administrations of OT

MMC Fall with Injury Prevention Project

Problem/Impact Statement: Patients falls with injury remains an elusive problem at MMC. Over the past 8 quarter, (2016 and 2017) MMC has outperformed 3 of the last 8 Quarters of data. The average rate for the past 8 quarters is .57/1000 patient days with the mean benchmark of .54/per 1000 patient days. MH has determined a focus goal for all the MH hospitals to be below .70/MH 100 patient days as a goal for falls with injury. MMC having the largest volume must be below NDNQI mean to drive this change as the .70 is the average of all MH hospitals. A fall with injury costs on Average cost of a fall with injury is $14,000., more importantly the cost to the patient may be an increase in hospital stay, and increase in level of care. Injuries range from lacerations to fractures and head trauma and death. Approximately 50% of all falls incur an injury. Putting interventions in place to decrease total falls will decrease injuries at MMC

Injectable Materials for the Treatment of Myocardial Infarction and Heart Failure: The Promise of Decellularized Matrices

Cardiovascular disease continues to be the leading cause of death, suggesting that new therapies are needed to treat the progression of heart failure post-myocardial infarction. As cardiac tissue has a limited ability to regenerate itself, experimental biomaterial therapies have focused on the replacement of necrotic cardiomyocytes and repair of the damaged extracellular matrix. While acellular and cellular cardiac patches are applied surgically to the epicardial surface of the heart, injectable materials offer the prospective advantage of minimally invasive delivery directly into the myocardium to either replace the damaged extracellular matrix or to act as a scaffold for cell delivery. Cardiac-specific decellularized matrices offer the further advantage of being biomimetic of the native biochemical and structural matrix composition, as well as the potential to be autologous therapies. This review will focus on the requirements of an ideal scaffold for catheter-based delivery as well as highlight the promise of decellularized matrices as injectable materials for cardiac repair

DataSHIELD: taking the analysis to the data, not the data to the analysis

Research in modern biomedicine and social science requires sample sizes so large that they can often only be achieved through a pooled co-analysis of data from several studies. But the pooling of information from individuals in a central database that may be queried by researchers raises important ethico-legal questions and can be controversial. In the UK this has been highlighted by recent debate and controversy relating to the UK's proposed 'care.data' initiative, and these issues reflect important societal and professional concerns about privacy, confidentiality and intellectual property. DataSHIELD provides a novel technological solution that can circumvent some of the most basic challenges in facilitating the access of researchers and other healthcare professionals to individual-level data. Commands are sent from a central analysis computer (AC) to several data computers (DCs) storing the data to be co-analysed. The data sets are analysed simultaneously but in parallel. The separate parallelized analyses are linked by non-disclosive summary statistics and commands transmitted back and forth between the DCs and the AC. This paper describes the technical implementation of DataSHIELD using a modified R statistical environment linked to an Opal database deployed behind the computer firewall of each DC. Analysis is controlled through a standard R environment at the AC. Based on this Opal/R implementation, DataSHIELD is currently used by the Healthy Obese Project and the Environmental Core Project (BioSHaRE-EU) for the federated analysis of 10 data sets across eight European countries, and this illustrates the opportunities and challenges presented by the DataSHIELD approach. DataSHIELD facilitates important research in settings where: (i) a co-analysis of individual-level data from several studies is scientifically necessary but governance restrictions prohibit the release or sharing of some of the required data, and/or render data access unacceptably slow; (ii) a research group (e.g. in a developing nation) is particularly vulnerable to loss of intellectual property-the researchers want to fully share the information held in their data with national and international collaborators, but do not wish to hand over the physical data themselves; and (iii) a data set is to be included in an individual-level co-analysis but the physical size of the data precludes direct transfer to a new site for analysis