Wednesday, December 3, 2008

All Nurses Need to Care

Caring is important in building patient-nurse relationships. Nurses, who take the time to get to know their patient, are show respect and understanding toward their patient’s cultural beliefs. Therefore, patients are more open minded and trusting toward their healthcare providers. “A caring relationship establishes the conditions of trust that enable the one receiving care to accept the help offered; underpinning the nurse-patient relationship or the therapeutic relationship” (Warelow, Edward, & Vinek, 2007, p. 147). When a nurse is caring for a patient, he or she is taking into consideration the whole family as well. In addition, a caring nurse always sees the patient as a whole. One important point for a nurse to know is that one should do for others what one would do for themselves.

Caring for an Alzheimer’s Patient

Caring for a family member with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) can be very stressful and frustrating. In Durham region, when a person is diagnosed with AD a social worker from the Community Access Centre is able to locate healthcare services for Alzheimer’s patients. For instance, there are home care services, day programs, or long-term facilities that can assist the patient to help take the stress off the family member caring for Alzheimer’s patient. Furthermore, home care services and day programs are recommended for patients in the first stage of AD. Patients, who are in their late stages of the disease, are usually admitted within long-term care facilities with 24 hour supervised nursing care.

After-hours Triage Nurse

The use of a nurse telephone triage after-hours service in Australia, has helped take the pressure off general practitioners. The GPs transfer their office telephone numbers to a 1-800 after-hours number. When a patient calls a practice after-hour the call is automatically connected to a trained telephone triage nurse located in a rural hospital (McGrath, & Macdonald, 2008, p. 786).The nurse takes the patient’s details and assesses whether the patient requires a nurse’s advice, an ambulance, or a local medical appointment for the next day. However, the triage nurse is not allowed to make a diagnosis over the phone (p.787). The service receives an average of 2573 calls a year.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Tecnology in Healthcare

Technology is helping communication barriers in healthcare. With all the new technologies, nurses, doctors, patients, and other care providers can communicate effectively and efficiently. Nurses are able to use PDAs to receive information from other colleagues about patient’s health records. Doctors can send electronic medication orders to pharmacies. This way the nurses do not have to try and figure out the doctor’s orders. In addition, technology is useful for staff information. For example, in the workplaces, healthcare providers have the option of online education and information on work seminars. Furthermore, nurses use intranet in hospital to retrieve accurate information about diseases.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Nursing

Hello everyone
My name is Luana. I am enrolled in the BScN program at the University Of Ontario Institute Of Technology. I am a mother of two children, so you can imagine how busy I am taking care of my kids and trying to keep up with my assignments. In addition, I am missing my partner because he is in France working towards his Master degree in Electronic Engineering. My soul mate and I communicate thought MSN or on the phone as much as possible. By creating a blog this could be another way we could communicate with each other. I think it is a good idea to create a blog because I can communication with other nursing student, and get information from other nursing blog links.