What constitutes advanced assessment?

As programs to prepare advanced practice nurses for primary care have flourished during the past decade, faculty aspire to teach a health assessment course that is more than a review of undergraduate work. Therefore, course faculty constructed a list of advanced assessment competencies. The purpose of this descriptive study was to validate the competencies clinical preceptors' rated as important via a mailed survey. Overall, the competencies received high mean ratings. The item receiving the highest mean score was "detects and interprets abnormalities in rate and rhythm" from the heart body system. Items within the gynecological and breast systems received the highest ratings. This study suggests a need to help advanced practice nursing students master all advanced assessment competencies on the survey.

The relations between cognition and the independent living skill of shopping in people with schizophrenia.

A great deal of interest has developed regarding the impact of cognitive deficits on the everyday functioning of people with schizophrenia. This study examined the relationships between cognitive functioning and the performance of a specific independent living skill (grocery shopping) in a sample of 73 individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Cognitive variables included tests of verbal memory, executive functioning, verbal fluency, sustained attention and visual motor skill. Functional outcome was measured with the Test of Grocery Shopping Skills, which is an ecologically based performance measure that requires participants to shop for 10 items within an actual grocery store. Accuracy on the shopping task was significantly associated with fewer perseverative responses on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, better verbal memory and faster processing speed. Shopping efficiency (i.e. less redundancy) was associated with better performance on several cognitive tasks, including verbal memory, verbal fluency, sustained attention and executive functioning. Results of this study extend previous research by examining the relation between cognition and the actual performance of daily living skills under natural circumstances.