HCPro.com: The Staff Educator

May 2008 (Volume 4, Issue 5)	view entire issue

Pain management: Educate to alleviate
Nurses want to provide patients with safe, comfortable care so that they don't have to bear unnecessary pain. However, "nursing research is rich with examples of patients receiving substandard pain management and sparse individualized education," according to an article in MEDSURG Nursing. Train your nurses on pain management and give them the tools and motivation they need to manage discomfort because the absence of pain management education can be far-reaching.

How to groom tomorrow's strong nurse leaders
"She was a great nurse. Her patients couldn't say enough nice things about her." "He was recognized as nurse of the year." "I don't understand what happened; she was the most competent nurse we had." Have you ever heard or said those phrases in respect to your nurse manager or department director? How many times do we take the best and brightest of our staff nurses and make them managers, only to discover they are not great managers? Unless nurses are educated and groomed for management or directorial positions, we cannot expect them to thrive as leaders.

Improve active listening with this game-based strategy
Improving the communication and active listening skills of your students is essential, regardless of the topic. According to an article in the Journal of Instructional Psychology, listening "is among our most consequential communication skills even though it is too frequently relegated to a lesser role in many educational, social, and political spheres." When it comes to using games to teach this skill, "it's fun, and it's nonthreatening," says Carla Bertsch, RN, MSN, director of education at Bonner General Hospital in Sandpoint, ID. "Employees love that venue."

Other recently-published articles from The Staff Educator:

Recognize, reward, and retain at your organization

Connect the dots with concept mapping

Improve active listening with this game-based strategy

How to groom tomorrow’s strong nurse leaders

Pain management: Educate to alleviate

Raise the curtain on new training strategies

Start them on the journey from Day 1

Educators can embrace new technology to improve patient safety

Beyond the color purple

Prevent catheter UTIs with practical measures

Science and simulation in the clinical setting

Take a big step toward falls prevention

Filling those empty chairs

When your patients are seeing red

Helping new grads adjust to the nursing world

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