Nursing

School-based health centers provide comprehensive reproductive and sexual health services to inner-city public school students, leading to enhanced access to contraception, prenatal care, and screening and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

A dedicated inpatient unit features a physical environment, staffing, policies, and services tailored to women with severe perinatal depression, leading to improvements in outcomes and high levels of patient satisfaction.

As mandated by State law, the California Department of Health Services requires acute care hospitals to maintain minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios and to develop various systems to ensure adequate nurse coverage and quality, leading to more reasonable workloads, lower patient mortality, and higher job satisfaction.

Kaiser Permanente Colorado and the Visiting Nurse Association in Denver jointly offer intense, consistent education to elderly heart failure patients discharged from the hospital in need of home-based skilled nursing care, leading to improved knowledge and self-management skills and fewer readmissions.

Registered nurses travel to farms to provide free preventive health and occupational safety screenings to farmers, leading to better eating habits and cholesterol levels, high attendance at followup appointments, and anecdotal reports of safety improvements.

A school district's multifaceted, collaborative initiative to reduce the impact of asthma includes multiple policies and subsequent programs such as electronic monitoring, case management, and stakeholder-specific education, leading to fewer asthma-related absences and better academic performance, behavior, health, and quality of life for students with asthma.

Hospitals participating in a collaborative used screening criteria, fast-track diagnostic testing, protocols to support the prompt initiation of treatment, and ongoing monitoring to reduce sepsis mortality by 54.5 percent.

Case managers remotely monitor Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions via a messaging device that asks and records answers to disease-specific and general health questions each day, leading to lower mortality and costs.

Trained school nurses held four weekly, one-on-one sessions with high school students who smoke; the sessions did not have a larger impact on long-term smoking rates than did four shorter, information-focused sessions, but both types of counseling generated higher long-term quit rates than typical programs targeted at teen smokers.

A scoring system assists hospital staff in selecting approaches and, if needed, assistive devices for lifting, moving, and/or repositioning patients, leading to significant reductions in staff injuries and the near elimination of lost and restricted work days caused by these injuries.