A Collaborative Academic-Practice Approach to Meeting Educational and Workforce Needs.

This article describes an innovative academic-practice partnership designed to promote new nurse competency and meet employer needs for graduates with in-demand knowledge and competencies in specialty patient populations. Three practice partners identified areas of need and with the school of nursing developed specialty nursing elective courses with precepted clinical experiences.

Identifying, building, and sustaining your leadership team.

Effective leadership teams are important to the success of any organization, regardless of size or scope. This article uses the concepts of social capital and trust to shed light on team building skills and focuses on strategies that leaders can use to assemble, build, and sustain their leadership teams. Written from the perspective of someone who has had many years of experience in leadership roles, the article includes actual examples and tactics used to develop and mentor team members, foster social networks to build the team, and imbue trust to sustain the team.

Hitting the nursing faculty shortage head on: strategies to recruit, retain, and develop nursing faculty.

More than ever before, schools of nursing are challenged with finding qualified faculty to teach growing numbers of undergraduate and graduate students. Qualified applicants by the thousands are being turned away, in large part because of an insufficient pipeline of faculty. This article describes how one school hit the shortage head on by creating alternate models for employing and growing new faculty, and then instituting a variety of strategies to develop and keep them.

Evidence for smoking cessation: Implications for gender-specific strategies.

BACKGROUND: Facilitating smoking cessation requires an evidence-based approach. The Lienhard School of Nursing Institute for Healthy Aging in the United States, whose focus is providing health information to aging baby boomers, developed an interest in studying strategies for smoking cessation in women. APPROACH: Studies were reviewed and critiqued related to the question: What is the relative efficacy of first-line smoking cessation interventions for women versus men in the 40- to 65-year-old age group? This article first discusses the procedure used to construct an integrative framework for finding the evidence on smoking cessation, including a literature search and refinement of the problem to be studied, and then a summary of the evidence gathered on the selected variable (gender) and interventions (counseling, pharmacotherapy, nicotine replacement therapy). FINDINGS: Evidence was found that supports the general efficacy of three first-line smoking cessation interventions: counseling, bupropion-sustained release (BSR), and nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). What the evidence does not show, however, is which of these interventions may be more effective for women versus men in general or specifically in the 40- to 65-year-old age group. RECOMMENDATIONS: Recommendations include the development of a clinical trial and the inclusion from the outset of gender as a major variable in all future intervention studies. IMPLICATIONS: Practice implications include the fact that since effective treatments already exist for assisting clients to stop smoking, all health-care providers should offer an intervention that has been found effective to any client who expresses a desire to quit smoking. Further studies of efficacy are needed to develop more focused implications.

Gender's effect on the efficacy of smoking cessation interventions.

Evidence-based guidelines and subsequent studies support the effectiveness of counselling and pharmacotherapy as first-line smoking cessation interventions. Gender is one of many factors that may have an impact on the efficacy of smoking cessation interventions. There is only very limited evidence, however, to answer the question of how gender influences the effectiveness of smoking cessation interventions. Research does suggest that concern about weight gain is related to women's confidence in their ability to stop smoking and this should be kept in mind when designing interventions. In the meantime, any client who indicates a desire to stop smoking should be offered one of the smoking cessation interventions that are already available.

Strategies for building faculty research programs in institutions that are not research intensive.

Colleges and universities without the resources of research-intensive universities face a special challenge to support faculty research. If doctorally prepared faculty are to assume. leadership roles in developing nursing science, deans must be responsive to faculty members' individual and collective responsibility to be active researchers. This article describes efforts on the part of two nursing programs, one in a private and one in a public university, to create an environment that nurtures scholarship of nursing faculty members at these institutions.