Unifying Vision: Strategies that Influence Nurse Self-Care Practices in Intensive Care Unit Nurses

Background: The notion of self-care should include more than physical health; the concept should also include emotional, mental, and spiritual self-care. Self-care behaviors are tailored to an individual\u27s perceptions and values. Purpose: The primary focus of this project aimed to improve nurse’s self-care practices. Through interviews with executive leadership at a large urban hospital, the project facilitator identified the need for easy access to self-care strategies for ICU nurses. Design Method: The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) Model for Quality Improvement was used for this project. A systematic review of the literature was performed to ascertain the effectiveness of self-care strategies for nurses. Conclusion: The project outcome was creating The Unifying Vision website containing creative strategies that support a healthy lifestyle and encourage intensive care unit (ICU) nurses to engage in self-care practices. Implications for Nursing: Stress among nurses has been linked to high nurse turnover, nursing shortages, and lack of nurse retention. Nurses who work with pain or depression experience more medication mistakes, patient falls, and provide decreased quality of care; however, frequent self-care interventions may help to relieve stress. When nurses experience job-related stress, the likelihood of effectively managing patient care becomes difficult

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