Nurse work environment influences stroke outcomes
2021-03-17
(Press-News.org) PHILADELPHIA (March 17, 2021) - Stroke remains a leading cause of death worldwide and one of the most common reasons for disability. While a wide variety of factors influence stroke outcomes, data show that avoiding readmissions and long lengths of stay among ischemic stroke patients has benefits for patients and health care systems alike. Although reduced readmission rates among various medical patients have been associated with better nurse work environments, it is unknown how the work environment might influence readmissions and length of stay for ischemic stroke patients.
In a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing's (Penn Nursing) Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR), researchers evaluated the association between the nurse work environment and readmission and length of stay for close to 200,000 hospitalized adult ischemic stroke patients in more than 500 hospitals. They found that in hospitals with better nurse work environments, ischemic stroke patients experienced lower odds of 7? and 30?day readmissions and lower lengths of stay.
Their research has been published in the journal Research in Nursing & Health. The article "Better Nurse Work Environments Associated with Fewer Readmissions and Shorter Length of Stay Among Adults with Ischemic Stroke: A Cross?Sectional Analysis of United States Hospitals" is available online.
"The work environment is a modifiable feature of hospitals that should be considered when providing comprehensive stroke care and improving post?stroke outcomes," says Heather Brom, PhD, RN, NP-C, lecturer at Penn Nursing and lead author of the article. "Our findings have important implications for quality improvement initiatives for stroke care management."
Creating good work environments for nurses is especially important so that they have adequate time to spend with stroke patients and can communicate effectively with all team members and feel supported by managers to make decisions about nursing care. "All of these aspects of the nurse work environment facilitate an effective and efficient discharge planning process, which has the potential to decrease delays in discharge and avoidable readmissions," says J. Margo Brooks Carthon, PhD, RN, FAAN, Associate Professor of Nursing and one of the co-authors of the article.
INFORMATION:
Additional co-authors include Mathew McHugh, PhD, JD, MPH,RN, FAAN, director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) at Penn Nursing, Linda Aiken, PhD, RN, FAAN, FRCN, founding director of CHOPR, and Douglas Sloane, PhD, Senior Fellow at CHOPR.
About the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing is one of the world's leading schools of nursing. For the sixth year in a row, it is ranked the #1 nursing school in the world by QS University and is consistently ranked highly in the U.S. News & World Report annual list of best graduate schools. Penn Nursing is ranked as one of the top schools of nursing in funding from the National Institutes of Health. Penn Nursing prepares nurse scientists and nurse leaders to meet the health needs of a global society through innovation in research, education, and practice. Follow Penn Nursing on: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, & Instagram.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-03-17
The NASA-funded Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) performed well in seismic experiments conducted in snowy summer Greenland, according to a new study by the SIIOS team led by the University of Arizona published this week in Seismological Research Letters.
SIIOS could be a part of proposed NASA spacecraft missions to the surface of Europa or Enceladus. These moons of Jupiter and Saturn are encrusted by an icy shell over subsurface liquid oceans, and seismic data could be used to better define the thickness and depth of these layers. Other seismic points of interest on these worlds could include ice volcanoes, drainage events below the ice shell and possibly even ...
2021-03-17
East Hanover, NJ. March 17, 2021. Kessler Foundation researchers have identified several practical and technical barriers to the widespread use of surface electromyography (sEMG) in clinical neurorehabilitation. Based on their holistic analysis of these factors, the researchers suggest a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and unified approach to enable rehabilitation professionals to routinely use sEMG. The article, "Use of Surface EMG in Clinical Rehabilitation of Individuals With SCI: Barriers and Future Considerations" (doi: 10.3389/fneur.2020.578559), was published December 18, 2020, in Frontiers in Neurology. It is available open access at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7780850/
The authors are Rakesh ...
2021-03-17
Autoimmune diseases are typically caused when the immune system, whose purpose is to deal with foreign threats to the body, incorrectly recognizes the body's own proteins and cells as threats and activates immune cells to attack them. In the case of rheumatoid arthritis, a well-known autoimmune disease, immune cells erroneously attack the body's own joint components and proteins, causing painful inflammation and even the destruction of bone! Scientists from Japan have now taken a massive step toward understanding and, potentially, treating rheumatoid arthritis better, with their discovery in a brand-new study. Read on to understand how!
The development of autoimmune diseases is an incredibly complex process, involving several key players ...
2021-03-17
A sustainable, powerful micro-supercapacitor may be on the horizon, thanks to an international collaboration of researchers from Penn State and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Until now, the high-capacity, fast-charging energy storage devices have been limited by the composition of their electrodes -- the connections responsible for managing the flow of electrons during charging and dispensing energy. Now, researchers have developed a better material to improve connectivity while maintaining recyclability and low cost.
They published their results on Feb. 8 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
"The supercapacitor is a very powerful, energy-dense device with a fast-charging rate, in contrast to the typical battery ...
2021-03-17
An international collaboration between Great Ormond Street Hospital, the UCL GOS Institute for Child Health and Harvard Medical School has shown that the beneficial effects of gene therapy can be seen decades after the transplanted blood stem cells has been cleared by the body.
The research team monitored five patients who were successfully cured of SCID-X1 using gene therapy at GOSH. For 3-18 years patients' blood was regularly analysed to detect which cell types and biomarker chemicals were present in their blood. The results showed that even though the stem cells transplanted as part of gene therapy had been cleared by the patients, the all-important corrected immune cells, called T-cells, were still forming.
Gene therapy works by first removing ...
2021-03-17
In researching the causes and potential treatments for degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease, neuroscientists frequently struggle to accurately identify cells needed to understand brain activity that gives rise to behavior changes such as declining memory or impaired balance and tremors.
A multidisciplinary team of Georgia Institute of Technology neuroscience researchers, borrowing from existing tools such as graphical models, have uncovered a better way to identify cells and understand the mechanisms of the diseases, potentially leading to better understanding, diagnosis, and treatment.
Their research findings were reported Feb. 24 in the journal eLife. The research was supported by the National Institutes of ...
2021-03-17
Hydrogen is a pollution-free energy source when it's extracted from water using sunlight instead of fossil fuels. But current strategies for "splitting" or breaking apart water molecules with catalysts and light require the introduction of chemical additives to expedite the process. Now, researchers reporting in ACS ES&T Engineering have developed a catalyst that destroys medications and other compounds already present in wastewater to generate hydrogen fuel, getting rid of a contaminant while producing something useful.
Harnessing the sun's energy to split water to make hydrogen fuel is a promising renewable resource, but it is a slow process even when catalysts are used to speed it along. In some cases, alcohols or sugars are added to boost the rate of hydrogen production, ...
2021-03-17
NEW YORK (March 17, 2021) -- High speed air dryers not only leave more contamination on poorly washed hands compared to paper towels, but during hand drying, they can also spread germs onto clothing, ultimately transferring more bacteria to other surfaces, according to a study published today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.
Past research has shown recommended handwashing practices for healthcare workers are often not followed with average adherence of 40%. To better understand the impact of hand drying in hand hygiene, researchers conducted an experiment to learn the role of different hand drying methods in spreading germs from poorly washed hands beyond the restroom.
For ...
2021-03-17
Scientists in Japan have observed, and interfered with, the ultrafast motion of electron movement inside of a Xenon atom using the coherent pairs of short light waves in synchrotron radiation. Xenon, consisting of a nucleus surrounded by five nested shells containing a total of 54 electrons, is used in flash lamps, and it burns bright and fast. The luminescent electrons move there on a time scale of one billionth of a second. The fast electron movement is however six orders of magnitude slower than that the scientists observed. Using the synchrotron facility at Institute for Molecular Science, they tracked the electron movement in relaxation to shed energy by dropping from an outer shell to an inner shell. The process happens at a timescale of femtoseconds, ...
2021-03-17
Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have designed a new bioink which allows small human-sized airways to be 3D-bioprinted with the help of patient cells for the first time. The 3D-printed constructs are biocompatible and support new blood vessel growth into the transplanted material. This is an important first step towards 3D-printing organs. The new study has been published in Advanced Materials.
Chronic lung diseases are the third leading cause of death worldwide with an EU cost of more than €380 billion annually. For many chronic diseases ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Nurse work environment influences stroke outcomes
