Nursing research
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Nursing is known as an occupation with high risk of musculoskeletal injury. Nurses' perceptions about the risk of injury may have a role in preventing such injury. ⋯ Study findings indicated that most critical care nurses were concerned about their ergonomic job risks. Their risk perceptions about musculoskeletal injury risk were affected by physical work exposures, psychosocial job stressors, and experience with musculoskeletal symptoms, but not by perceived workplace safety climate. The findings underscore the need for management efforts to improve physical and psychosocial working conditions and create a safe work environment.
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Use of composite variables is a common practice, but knowledge about what researchers should consider when creating composite variables is lacking. ⋯ Each approach to creating composite variables has advantages and disadvantages that researchers should weigh carefully. With normally distributed data, composite variables provide the greatest increases in power when the original variables (that make up the composite variable) have similar associations with the outside outcome variable.
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Researchers have used various methods to describe and quantify the work of nurses. Many of these studies were focused on nursing in general care settings; therefore, less is known about the unique work nurses perform in intensive care units (ICUs). ⋯ This study provides useful information about how nurses spend their time in various ICUs. The methodology can be used in future research to examine changes in work related to, for example, implementation of health information technology.
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For over 100 years, nurses' particular work conditions have been anecdotally associated with increases in substance abuse. Reasons include job-related stress and easy access to medications. Current research has suggested that prevalence of nurses with substance use problems is actually similar to, if not less than, that seen in the general population. However, given nurses' proximity to critical patient care, the potential threat to public health, as well as the current shortage of practitioners and problems related to retention, the lack of research on the effectiveness of the two existing treatment protocols (disciplinary and alternative-to-discipline [ATD]) is a pressing issue of concern to the nursing profession. ⋯ The ATD programs potentially have a greater impact on protecting the public than disciplinary programs because ATD programs identify and/or enroll more nurses with substance use problems, thereby initially removing more nurses with substance use problems from direct patient care.