International journal of nursing studies
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The Critical-Care Pain Observation Tool (CPOT) is one of the few behavioural pain scales which have been developed and validated for the purpose of detecting pain in nonverbal critically ill adults. ⋯ The CPOT was successfully implemented and seemed to have positive effects on pain assessment and management nursing practices in the ICU. Further research is warranted to look at its impact on patient outcomes.
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Oncology nurses should possess a high level of sensitivity while dealing with patients' sexual health needs. However, sexual health care is still inadequately addressed because of barriers such as conservative beliefs and incorrect assumptions regarding sexual issues. Most scales for measuring attitude toward sexual health care were insufficient to establish the instrument's validity and did not focus on oncology nurses. ⋯ The scale of attitude toward sexual health care showed validity and reliability in evaluating the attitude of oncology nurses toward sexual health care and can be used to identify attitudinal barriers in nurses as well as to develop and test educational interventions for the improvement of sexual health care.
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According to the latest pressure ulcer definition provided by the EPUAP and NPUAP pressure and shear are named as factors causing pressure ulcers. Empirical evidence suggests that pressure forces in combination with shear seem to be primarily responsible for deeper tissue injuries leading to category III or IV pressure ulcers. Superficial frictional forces seem to cause skin lesion resembling category II pressure ulcers. ⋯ Based on a large sample of patients from multiple centres throughout Germany results indicate, that there is a strong relationship between friction forces and superficial skin lesions and between pressure forces and deeper categories III and IV PUs. This indicates that there might be different aetiologies causing different wounds. Given, that both superficial and deep ulcers have different aetiologies the validity of the current PU definition and classification is questionable, because ulcers due to maceration and excoriation are excluded from this classification system.