Intensive & critical care nursing : the official journal of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses
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Intensive Crit Care Nurs · Feb 2000
Balancing stakeholder needs: a review of ENB 100 and 415 courses. English National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting.
This paper reports the findings of a documentary analysis and literature review of general and paediatric intensive care unit (ICU) courses (ENB 100 and ENB 415). The findings are part of a larger review of critical care courses commissioned by the English National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting (ENB), also incorporating operating department, coronary care and accident and emergency courses. It was important to set the curriculum review in the context of intensive care practice and education, hence the study also comprised interviews with lecturers and ICU managers. ⋯ However, the majority of the managers interviewed for this study (63% of General ICU managers (n = 19) and 83% (n = 6) of Paediatric ICU managers) were generally satisfied with the competencies and skills of the nurses who had undertaken the ENB course. The authors conclude from the diverse nature of the courses that there is little national comparability in the courses although this finding might be an artefact of documentary analysis. The extent to which this (apparent) diversity results in different levels of competence in practice requires further exploration.
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This study was designed to identify and measure the patients' perspective of the concept quality of life within the context of a high-dependency unit (HDU). Data were collected in two phases. In phase one, 55 patients were interviewed, which resulted in the concept clarification of quality of life as: physical, social, psychological and family/friends. ⋯ Post-HDU patients demonstrated improvements upon pre-admission scores in both instruments (the social domain in the quality of life index being the exception), although this only reached statistical significance P<0.05 in the overall index score and within the domains of health and family. When exploring variables of age and severity of illness (Apache 2 score, Knaus et al. 1980) it was the people who were older and physiologically compromised to an increased extent (P<0.05) who demonstrated higher levels of satisfaction with their resulting quality of life. This study has been successful in providing patients with an opportunity to participate more actively in service evaluation and has identified the need for future evaluation of HDUs to move beyond physiological measures, to incorporate the impact that illness leading to admission to an HDU has upon the patients' ability to function and their resulting quality of life.