International emergency nursing
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Older Australians experience health disparities in pain management compared to other groups. This article is focused on understanding the emergency nurses' perceptions of pain and pain management for older persons with cognitive impairment and presenting with a long bone fracture. This article is part of a larger study focusing on emergency nurses' pain management practices for older Australians with cognitive impairment. ⋯ This study makes clear the challenges clinicians' face in managing pain in older patients presenting to emergency departments. More specifically, older persons with cognitive impairment face substantially greater obstacles in receiving effective pain relief given the lack of any standardised pain assessment screening tool within emergency departments. To improve pain management practices emergency clinicians need to test the utility of behavioural pain assessment tools for cognitively impaired older persons within the emergency context.
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Pain is a common problem for which patients seek care in the emergency department, accounting for up to 42% of all ED visits. The purpose of this study was to explore qualitatively the reasons for use of the emergency department (ED) by those frequenting the ED for treatment of chronic pain. The settings for the study were two sites of a large U. ⋯ Four themes emerged from the qualitative data analysis: time of day, pain intensity, barriers to and reasons for using the emergency department for care, and lack of individualized plan of care. Reasons patients use the ED for chronic pain are numerous and complex. Leaders of healthcare organizations must address patient-centered care, with specific alternatives to the emergency department such as individualized care plans, and care transition interventions.
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Despite the importance of early effective bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to improve survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, the attitudes toward performing, learning and disseminating CPR in university students of China are still unclear. ⋯ CPR technique, victim's status, respondent's specialty and respondent's gender affected the attitudes of respondents toward performing bystander CPR. The top four reasons for being unwilling to perform bystander CPR were lack of confidence, fear of legal disputes, fear of disease transmission and feeling embarrassed. However, the key reason for being unwilling to perform bystander CPR differed in different specialties and particularly 'feeling embarrassment' might be a cultural phenomenon. The attitudes toward learning and disseminating CPR were positive and affected by respondent's gender and specialty.