Emergency nurse : the journal of the RCN Accident and Emergency Nursing Association
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The National Emergency Medicine Programme Strategy is a comprehensive plan to improve and develop emergency care in Ireland. It recommends significant changes in how emergency care is organised and delivered so that patients can be confident that they will receive high quality, safe and timely care. Emergency nurses were involved in developing aspects of the strategy document and will play a crucial role in its implementation to ensure that patient outcomes and satisfaction with emergency care services in Ireland are improved.
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Until recently, adult safeguarding policies at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust did not cover domestic abuse, except in maternity services. While trying to remedy this deficit, the trust discovered several problems in information sharing and data protection, which led to consideration of how safeguarding alerts are handled and processed on patient arrival. This article explains how the trust solved these problems by setting up a safeguarding log to alert staff to at-risk patients.
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Many patients with minor burns present at emergency departments and urgent care centres, where their management is often undertaken by experienced nurses rather than experts in treating burns. This article describes a small study of the clinical decision making that underpins nurses' management of minor burns in these non-specialist settings. The results suggest that, due to a lack of relevant research, nurses base their decisions on previous experience or expert colleagues' opinions and advice rather than on the evidence.