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Improving Vaccination Uptake In The Latinx Community Through Standardized Outreach, Vanessa M. Arteaga

Master's Projects and Capstones

Vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic has been an issue in the Latinx and Black community since the initial discussions of the emergency use of the experimental Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. The aim of this project is to standardize the patient outreach process to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Patients at a community clinic in Oakland have expressed hesitance of the COVID-19 vaccine. They also exhibited increased frustration with the staff who are contacting them to schedule vaccine appointments and provide information. This resulted in refusal of the vaccine and less than desirable number of vaccine appointments. The objective of this …

Reexamining Overuse Of Frequent Observation For New Admissions On Psychiatric Units To Increase Nurse/Patient Engagement, Samuel Novela

Master's Theses

People in California who suffer from mental health conditions are often admitted involuntarily to hospitals on 72 hour psychiatric evaluation holds if they are deemed imminently dangerous to themselves, or others, or are gravely disabled. Observational patient safety checks are performed and based on patient acuity and hospital standards. Variations exist among different clinical settings with regard to best practices and the patient subpopulations that may warrant less frequent safety checks. Nurses experience different levels of satisfaction with regard to frequency of safety checks because there is no national consensus on which subsets of patients may require them. A senior …

Reduction Of Antipsychotic Use In Patients With Dementia Residing In Nursing Homes, Marysarah Frank

DNP Scholarly Projects

Abstract

Residents of nursing homes diagnosed with dementia have long been treated with psychotropic drugs for the symptoms of behavioral disturbances that are frequently associated with major neurocognitive disease. Specifically, the antipsychotic drugs have been widely used in this population. Despite a lack of evidence, antipsychotic rates have shown up to 25% of dementia patients in nursing homes (NH) are prescribed these drugs. This off-label use is not FDA approved for behavioral symptoms of dementia and the drugs have been given a black box warning related to the risk of serious and potentially irreversible side effects and even an increased …

Effects Of Environmental Stressors And Design On Patient Outcomes In Icu Patients, Lauren Lea Mcnary, Jenea Ruttino, Kylie Thanasiu

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Over four million patients are admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) every year. The ICU, along with many health care settings, is generally regarded as a stress inducing environment, which may contribute to negative patient outcomes. Yet, there has been little progress in developing environments that are optimal to patient healing and using evidence-based design for ICUs. Aspects of environment studied that can be manipulated to increase positive patient outcomes are aroma, light, noise, private rooms, windows, and layout of the room. The purpose of this systematic review is to answer the PICO question, in hospitalized critically ill adults, …

Adherence Of Nurse Practitioners To Jnc 8 Guidelines, Stephanie E. Averette

Theses and Dissertations

The purposes of the evidence based project were to implement a best practice algorithm for treatment of hypertension (HTN) based on JNC 8 guidelines; compare nurse practitioners HTN pharmacotherapy prescribing practices before and after implementation of a HTN algorithm; and compare hypertensive adult patients’ systolic blood pressure (SBP) readings before and after the implementation of a HTN algorithm. A quasi-experimental pre-test and post-test design was used to collect and analyze data from 61 patient charts to compare nurse practitioner adherence to JNC 8 guidelines for NPs’ prescribing practices and subjects’ blood pressure (BP) outcome before and after the implementation of …

Reducing Annual Emergency Department Visits Through Improved Asthma Discharge Teaching, Alvin R. Walters

Master's Projects and Capstones

Asthma is the most common pediatric condition in the United States, and a child's home environment plays an impactful role in the triggering of asthma exacerbations (Harper et al., 2015). Current emergency department (ED) ideology focuses on symptoms management, with little time spent on education, and virtually no attention paid to the home environment. Evidence shows that programs which incorporate home environmental assessments into asthma patient education produce a reduction in annual ED visits, fewer missed school days, decreased use of rescue medications, and improvements in quality of life (Gruber K.J., et al, 2016, Hollenbach J.P. & Cloutier M.M., 2015, …

Nurse Anesthetists' Perception Of Their Rigorous Training Program A Grounded Theory Study, Joy Kieffer Phillips

Presidential Alumni Research Dissemination Award

There is no empirical understanding of the stressors that nurse anesthesia students encounter from their perspective as they negotiate a nurse anesthesia program. The initial research questions for this study examined what stressors these recent graduates encountered during their program and how they successfully negotiated those stressors. This study employed grounded theory methodology and the theory of symbolic interactionism. The data were collected from individual, semistructured, indepth interviews with 12 recent nurse anesthesia graduates who have been out of school for less than 2 years. The interview transcripts were analyzed using open, axial, and selective coding. The stressors discovered were …