Critical care nurse
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Critical care nurse · Dec 2014
Improving patients' readiness for coronary artery bypass graft surgery.
Preoperative interventions improve outcomes for patients after coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG). ⋯ Implementation of interventions to optimize patients' "readiness for surgery" is associated with shorter intubation times and shorter hospital stays after CABG.
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Critical care nurse · Dec 2014
The adam williams initiative: collaborating with community resources to improve care for traumatic brain injury.
The Brain Trauma Foundation has developed treatment guidelines for the care of patients with acute traumatic brain injury. However, a method to provide broad acceptance and application of these guidelines has not been published. ⋯ Carefully cultivated relationships and relentless teamwork have contributed to successful implementation of the Brain Trauma Foundation's guidelines in US hospitals.
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Critical care nurses are constantly challenged to provide safe, high-quality patient care at a low cost with increasingly scarce resources while implementing the latest evidence-based practices into their own clinical practice. This article is the first in a 4-part series to provide a practical quality improvement guide for critical care nurses interested in implementing system process or performance improvement projects within their own units. Part 1 is designed to answer the question "What method is better for measuring real-world patient outcomes-quality improvement or clinical research?" A broad overview of the differences between quality improvement and clinical research is provided. A newly published checklist to differentiate between attributes of each process is introduced, and readers can test their own knowledge between quality improvement and research with a quick quiz of studies recently published in Critical Care Nurse.