Suicide is the second leading cause of death for college-aged adults with nearly 3,900 deaths in 2010 (CDC, 2015). With this in mind, suicide can be prevented when communities are provided with adequate support systems. Our research is focused on describing counties with crude rates of 20 or more suicides per 100,000 residents aged 18-24 in an effort to find trends in data such as population density, median household income, and ethnic/racial mix and to increase awareness. Understanding the environmental context associated with suicide risk will facilitate communication among healthcare providers, patients, and their families and contribute to prevention efforts. Our analysis will be focused on data comparisons. Through the CDC’s Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, we have accumulated data about deaths caused by suicide nationwide during the years 2004-2010. Using Social Explorer, a web-based platform that facilitates creation and customization of maps, our counties of interest are clearly marked providing a visual model of our data making geographic trends easily noticeable. Our current work also includes searching for trends in the socioeconomic data by comparing our counties of interest with randomly selected counties in corresponding states that have suicide rates below 20 per 100,000. This will be done to determine if there are disparities in the socioeconomic profiles of counties with very high rates of suicides with those counties with lower rates. Once this is completed, we will be able to more confidently make claims regarding common factors contributing to higher suicide rates in college-aged adults.

The utilization of complimentary therapies in nursing practice reduces stress in patients in post-surgical and oncological areas. Patients rely on nursing support to advocate for the provision of these therapies. While research has established benefits of these therapies, many states do not license or regulate the practice. Because there is no regulation of Reiki practice in most states, the ability for the nurse to advocate for the patient can become compromised. This review of the literature is a first step in identifying legal responsibilities of nurses involved in this dilemma.

The literature review, using CINAHL, shows that reiki has been helpful to patients post caesarean delivery, post total knee arthroplasty, and post chemotherapy in breast cancer. At present, there is no national or state wide system for credentialing of personnel wishing to attend to hospitalized patients. The time is ripe to determine whether this complimentary therapy should be monitored by the state because: there are many documented and undocumented Reiki masters advertising to the public and charging money for therapy, most of these individuals are not educated in healthcare and HIPPAA restricts information that can be exchanged between these practitioners and healthcare providers.

Reiki should be available for patients who can benefit from the stress reduction and ability to contribute to the healing of patients where patients choose this therapy. A registry of providers can assist in assuring patient safety, determining the need for licensure, and that all practitioners are up to date with current communication and HIPPAA compliance.

Electronic medical record (EMR), has been well studied and implemented in acute care settings, although it has moved into long term settings such as post-acute care. Post-acute long term care has not been well studied in the use or implementation of EMR. EMR is how nurses record patient information and is, therefore, an integral part of the system. A local facility has several years of experience with their EMR but feels as though there have been difficulties in the full implementation and utilization of the EMR by their staff. They reached out to us with a goal of identifying the barriers affecting the staff’s usage of the EMR. The literature has identified several barriers to the utilization and implementation with EMR in the hospital or acute care setting but is less well studied in post-acute long term care. The purpose of this research was to identify barriers in the post-acute long term care use of EMR. The barriers, once identified, were then used to develop a survey tool. The survey tool was developed with the intention to gather data from post-acute long term care settings, and aims to identify the staff’s perceived barriers to the EMR. The survey tool uses Likert scale questions to achieve that goal, and the questions are based on support by the literature’s findings of barriers to EMR. In conclusion, this research is based on literature reviews that were used to create a survey tool to identify barriers in post-acute long term care.

With a well-documented organ donor shortage, organ donation has become a major public health issue. Through a previous literature synthesis, the author revealed a knowledge deficit amongst baccalaureate nursing students related to organ donation. It is hypothesized that utilizing teaching modalities (i.e., simulation experience) will increase overall knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to organ donation in baccalaureate nursing students. It is crucial to have a well-rounded education as a nurse in order to provide adequate and competent care to patients. A competent nurse would be capable to better educate patients about organ donation.

Using the 47-item Nursing Students Organ Donation Questionnaire 2016 the hypothesized benefit of the simulation experience was investigated. The questions were designed to measure the students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to organ donation. Whereas the data is currently being collected, the difference in the control group and experimental groups will be tested using an independent t-test.

As organ donation is becoming an ever-increasing healthcare priority, education that begins in nursing school is crucial. By exposing the nursing student to the delicate situations related to organ donation, the student will be more accustomed and comfortable when they face this process in their nursing career. Nurses competent in organ donation are better equipped to educate patients about organ donation. The main goal is to provide better patient education to increase organ donor rates, minimizing the organ donor shortage currently existing in the United States.

A 2010 Institute of Medicine report identified nurses as essential to health care leadership and decision making, resulting in a national campaign focused on increasing the number of nurses who serve on governing boards. Despite these efforts, nurses are excruciatingly underrepresented on all types of executive boards. My goal for this project was to conduct a literature search to develop a deeper understanding of the issues related to nurses on boards to support the Nurses on Boards movement. Articles were found using the CINAHL database, and then were analyzed and categorized on a matrix, which includes basic information about each article and an indication of its “usefulness” in the context of the Nurses on Boards movement.

The articles denoted as not useful in the matrix were interesting and engaging, but generally not scholarly or not relevant to this project. The potentially useful articles contained good research or cited sources, but were not pertinent to my review. The useful articles contained good, pertinent information relating directly to my study.

The consensus of the articles is that nurses need to be present on decision making boards. Possessing qualities that make them compassionate and caring, nurses foster empathetic decisions making on the boards they reside on. Nurses are extremely underrepresented and need to be self-advocating and autonomous to gain position and power on boards. Nurses make up the largest portion of the hospital workforce, but are the least represented on these boards, and there needs to be a paradigm shift to accommodate them.

There is currently a lack of information available on organ donation that is relevant to nursing students. This descriptive study tests the hypothesis that including additional material through a blackboard course will increase knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) of nursing students to better prepare the soon to be nurses for the delicacy of organ donation.

A previous literature review identified the problems associated with organ donation that nursing students should be taught about in their nursing education. Those problems identified became the backbone to the blackboard course. The blackboard course also focused on the QSEN competencies, which allowed for a focus on KSAs essential for nursing students to become acquainted with organ donation.

The research was conducted using the modified survey, the Nursing Students Organ Donation Questionnaire 2016. The pre-post survey consisted of 47 questions that test the students’ current KSAs related to organ donation. The population for the study was the senior level nursing course, Nursing of the Critically Ill. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The control group received the traditional lecture and the experimental group received the supplementary blackboard course. While all the data has not been conducted at this time, the results will be analyzed using an independent t-test.

As organ donation is becoming an ever increasing healthcare priority, education that begins in nursing school is crucial. By exposing students to the delicate situations related to organ donation, the students will be more comfortable when facing this process in their nursing career.

Problem and Significance: Facing the end of one’s life brings about many unique questions, concerns and uncertainties. Research shows that many uncertainties are spiritual in nature, however, there is confusion about what spiritual uncertainty means for people with nonreligious beliefs such as atheism. Nurses are expected to provide spiritual care to all patients, including those with atheistic views but research about atheistic perspectives of spirituality, uncertainty, and the end of life are limited.

Method: The parent study used phenomenology to understand how uncertainty affected six hospice patients. Most participants described Western religious beliefs but one individual described himself as atheist. This analysis will utilize case study methods to conduct an in-depth analysis of one atheistic account of end-of-life uncertainties. Data will be triangulated with other research and sources of popular culture.

Results: Findings will describe how one participant with an atheistic viewpoint experienced uncertainty related to his approaching death and how those experiences compare with accounts in previous research and popular culture.

Conclusion: Nurses are expected to provide holistic care to patients that includes spirituality yet little is known about patients with atheistic beliefs. This analysis begins to address this gap since having an awareness of how people diversely anticipate and experience the end of life is crucial to all providers of end of life care.