BACKGROUND Specialist palliative care nurses have considerable expertise in pain management and this expertise can contribute to tension in the boundary between specialist nurses and non-specialist doctors. OBJECTIVES This article reports on how specialist palliative care nurses contribute to team talk about pain and the rhetorical strategies they use to develop their reputation and credibili...

INTRODUCTION The treatment of patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) remains sub-optimal. Specialist CHF nurses are proven to improve care and reduce admission but developing such services, especially in remote areas, can be difficult. This study aimed: first, to assess the perceived acceptability and effectiveness of a new community based nurse-led heart failure service by general practitio...

INTRODUCTION The National Health Service currently faces significant challenges and must optimise effective workforce planning and management. There are increasing concerns regarding poor workforce planning for respiratory medicine; a greater understanding of the role of respiratory nurse specialists will inform better workforce planning and management. METHODS This was a survey study. Two su...

OBJECTIVE A previous randomised trial showed that structured, nurse-led atrial fibrillation (AF) care is superior to conventional AF care, although further research is needed to determine the outcomes of such care in a real-world setting. We compared the outcomes of patients in real-world, nurse-led, structured hospital AF clinics with the outcomes of a randomised trial of the efficacy of a nur...

This article describes one university's experience in creating a master's geriatric clinical nurse specialist-nurse educator program to address the nursing faculty shortage and the need for geriatric clinical nurse specialists. The successes and challenges are outlined, and curricular ideas that may be beneficial to other nursing programs also are presented. This program has enhanced the univer...

From an apprenticeship model at the time of Florence Nightingale, nursing has moved out of hospitals and today has taken a university-based education approach. In addition, regulatory bodies have called for the baccalaureate degree as entry to practice for the profession of nursing beginning in the year 2020. The role of the nurse has expanded from that of bedside nurse and handmaiden of the ph...

The clinical nurse specialist (CNS) role in Canada has 5 key components: clinical practice, consultation, education, research, and leadership. This study focuses on the consultation component: how it is described by CNSs and the facilitators and barriers to its implementation. A qualitative descriptive design was used to interview 8 CNSs who worked with adult populations in a university hospita...