Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Social Process Of Dying In The Hospital: A Grounded Theory Study, Alyson Prokop

Doctoral Dissertations

The majority of deaths in the United States occur in the hospital (Xu, Kochanek, Murphy, & Tejada-Vera, 2010). Because there is little understanding of the meaning behind this delicate social process for the patient, the purpose of this study was to develop a theory that describes the social processes one undergoes during the in-hospital end-of-life phase. Grounded theory methodology was chosen to understand this phenomenon and then explain it theoretically (Charmaz, 1990). The data used to develop the theoretical model was previously collected by StoryCorps and therefore components of secondary analysis were taken into consideration. Stories that are housed at …

A Well-Being Vision: Transcending Care., Judith A Boerger, Pamela Bland, Carolyn Meyer, Kristen Ruble, Sue Ehinger Pnd

Nursing Publications

Well-being is a competitive strategy to attract the best and brightest talents and keep them from burning out or leaving.

Improving Patient Experience And Education By Leveraging Technology, Cathy Palleschi, Wendy Osgood, Mark Parker, Cecilia Inman, Alicia Russell, Eileen Shanahan, Erin Pappal

Operations Transformation

It is estimated that 65% of the population are visual learners. With that in mind, a team of cardiac nurses in a large academic tertiary hospital developed a quality improvement project to hopefully improve patient engagement as well the patients’ perception that the nurses explained things in a manner that they could understand.

Baseline patient survey scores for the question, “Nurses Explained Things In A Way That I Understand”, were under the 75^thpercentile for a period of 9 months. A root cause analysis was conducted and it demonstrated numerous reasons for this score.

Several countermeasures were instituted to …

Getting To Zero: Creating An Infrastructure To Support Fall Prevention In A Medical–Surgical Unit, Krys Elgarico

Master's Projects and Capstones

Problem: Hospital falls are a growing national patient safety concern that cause anxiety, pain, distress, serious injuries, and increased health care utilization. Despite the presence of a well-developed falls prevention protocol since 2017. Internal data from an inpatient medical-surgical telemetry (MST) unit indicate the largest number of fall-related events among the hospital’s departments.

Context: Practice improvement project was initiated in a 217-bed community hospital to determine barriers and potential success factors. This MST is a dynamic, 48-bed unit providing care to mainly geriatric patients who require continuous telemetry monitoring and complex medical, trauma, and surgical services. Senior leaders in the …

Collaborative Self-Management And Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Integrating Patient Needs Into An Educational Program For Nurses, Loretta G. Mccormick Rn (Ec)

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects over 2.5 million individuals Canada wide and is the leading cause of hospitalization in Canada among chronic diseases with an 18% hospital readmission rate. The high cost of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and readmissions for COPD tells a story of need; the need for education of patients. Collaborative self-management (CSM) is a process whereby the individual patient and nurse work together to improve health. The integration of CSM in COPD care has shown evidence for reduced exacerbations, hospitalizations and readmissions. Little is known about the level of knowledge and self-efficacy of hospital-based nurses …

Barriers To Hospital Food Waste: A Pilot Exploratory Study, Jennifer Goulding

Honors College

Food waste is an ever-growing problem in this country and hospitals are large producers of food waste. Food is something that is beneficial to everyone on the planet, but when wasted, it creates added methane gas production which contributes to the greenhouse gas effect. There is a paucity in the literature concerning industry specific food waste disposal processes. To add knowledge about food waste in Maine, a 24-question survey was used to ask healthcare organizations nutritional and environmental personnel about, food disposal, reuse, and environmental sustainability efforts. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The response rate was low, however …

Rotating Shifts Vs. Fixed Schedules, Sara Vallett, Ba, Bsn, Rn, Dilek Reisoglu, Bs, Bsn, Rn

College of Nursing Posters

Purpose

• This EBP project seeks to examine the literature and nurses’ perceptions related to rotating shifts, especially the impact of quick returns on nurses and possible solutions.
• Nurses struggle to manage rotating shifts with quick turnaround between shifts. Quick returns defined as returning to work a different shift within 24 hrs

PICO question: What effect does rotating shifts with (quick returns) have on clinical nurses?

The Effect Of Volunteers’ Care And Support On The Health Outcomes Of Older Adults In Acute Care: A Systematic Scoping Review, Rosemary Saunders, Karla Seaman, Renée Graham, Angela Christiansen

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Aim: To examine the available evidence on the effects of care and support provided by volunteers on the health outcomes of older adults in acute care services.

Background: Acute hospital inpatient populations are becoming older, and this presents the potential for poorer health outcomes. Factors such as chronic health conditions, polypharmacy and cognitive and functional decline are associated with increased risk of health care‐related harm, such as falls, delirium and poor nutrition. To minimise the risk of health care‐related harm, volunteer programmes to support patient care have been established in many hospitals worldwide.

Design: A systematic scoping review.

Methods: The …

Patient-Centered Medical Homes And Hospital Value-Based Purchasing: Investigating Provider Responses To Incentives, Lauryn Walker

Theses and Dissertations

Provider incentives are a commonly used policy tool to mold provider behaviors.¹ However, while we frequently measure the change in patient outcomes, failure to consistently produce changes in outcomes does not mean that providers are not changing their behavior. This paper focuses on two programs with null or inconsistent quality outcomes to try to identify why such inconsistency occurs. The two programs, both ratified in the Affordable Care Act, are 1) patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs), and 2) the Medicare Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP) program.

Chapter 1: Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel survey (MEPS), I match provider characteristic …