Critical Care Nursing Commons^™

Providing End-Of-Life Care To Patients: Critical Care Nurses' Perceived Obstacles And Supportive Behaviors, Renea L. Beckstrand, Karin T. Kirchhoff

Faculty Publications

• Background Critical care nurses care for dying patients daily. The process of dying in an intensive care unit is complicated, and research on specific obstacles that impede delivery of end-of-life care and/or supportive behaviors that help in delivery of end-of-life care is limited.
• Objective To measure critical care nurses' perceptions of the intensity and frequency of occurrence of (1) obstacles to providing end-of-life care and (2) supportive behaviors that help in providing end-of-life care in the intensive care unit.
• Methods An experimental, posttest-only, control-group design was used. A national, geographically dispersed, random sample of members of the American Association of …

Analysis Of End-Of-Life Content In Critical Care Nursing Textbooks, Karin T. Kirchhoff, Renea L. Beckstrand, Prashanth Reddy Anumandla

Faculty Publications

Nurses have identified a need for improving their knowledge and skills in providing end-of-life care. Critical care nursing textbooks can serve as an important source of information on end-of-life care for critical care nurses. Hence, an analysis of end-of-life content in 14 critical care nursing textbooks was conducted. Critical care nursing textbooks used for review were published in 1995 or later and identified from the libraries at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Brigham Young University. The end-of-life content areas identified by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), under which the AACN end-of-life competencies for undergraduate nursing students can …

A Young Girl With Missile Trauma Near The Eye, Renea L. Beckstrand, Ellen K. Sanders

Faculty Publications

A 15-year-old girl who came to the emergency department holding tissue to her right eye said that she had been shot. She had right eye pain and swelling below the eye, and she was bleeding. As the girl was getting off a school bus, a male occupant in a car that was driving past reached out of the passenger side window and shot multiple pellets at the school bus with a pellet gun. The shooter was unknown to the girl; the shooting seemed to be random. When the girl was shot she felt pain immediately in the area between her …