Changing behaviors. Nurse educators and clinical nurse specialists design a discharge planning program.

In this article, the authors describe a discharge planning program developed for geriatric and maternal-child nurses at Mount Sinai Medical Center. King's theory of goal attainment was used in the program design and teach strategies were selected that matched behavioral objectives in the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domain. Evaluation methods include participants' pre- and post-surveys regarding their comfort in implementing discharge planning and concurrent review of their documentation 1 month after the program. After participating in the program, staff nurses displayed a change in behavior in terms of increased documentation relating to discharge planning.

The effect of an advanced cardiac life support course on advanced cardiac life support ability.

Thousands of health care providers spend time, money, and energy each year taking the AHA-sponsored ACLS courses, and ACLS-certified health care providers are frequently given greater job responsibility than other health care providers in the same setting. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of an ACLS course on the ability of health care providers to perform ACLS in a simulated situation. A nonequivalent control group design was used. The sample consisted of 76 health care providers whose job responsibilities included ACLS. The Mega-Code skill station from the ACLS course was used to evaluate ACLS performance. Chi-square analyses showed a significant (p less than 0.05) difference in the posttest pass/fail results of the two groups and a significant (p less than 0.05) difference in the changes from pretest to posttest of the two groups. The research hypotheses were supported, and the researches concluded that the course had a positive effect on the subjects' ACLS ability.