Accidental needlestick injuries in the academic setting: a model follow-up program.

Developed in response to needlestick injuries received by university nursing students, a model for initiating a comprehensive faculty and student follow-up treatment program for incidents involving blood and body fluids is presented. Providing an overview of need and risks, the authors review the program components, such as reporting mechanisms, program initiation, use of screening tests, recommended treatment modalities, and a decision-analysis for guiding the process.

Psychological correlates of loneliness in the older adult.

Loneliness is the emotional response to the discrepancy between desired and available relationships. As people grow old, the likelihood of experiencing age-related losses increases. Such losses may impede the maintenance or acquisition of desired relationships, resulting in a higher incidence of loneliness. This pilot study examines how loneliness relates to age-related losses, hopelessness, self-transcendence, and spiritual well-being in a convenience sample of 107 adults aged 65 years or older. The collective utility of the independent variables in predicting loneliness was investigated by means of a regression decision tree with an automatic random subset crossvalidation procedure. This procedure explained 46% of the variance. Higher scores for age-related losses and hopelessness were associated with higher loneliness scores. Higher scores for self-transcendence and existential spiritual well-being were associated with lower loneliness scores.

Lifestyle assessment. A tool for practice.

Examining a patient's lifestyle becomes imperative in a health-promotion and disease-prevention practice. A recently developed, practical lifestyle assessment tool is the Health Risk Appraisal (HRA), which examines the strengths and weaknesses of a patient's health behaviors. An HRA identifies detrimental health practices that predispose a patient to onset of illness. HRA instruments estimate the odds that a person with a given set of characteristics will become ill or die from selected diseases during a specified period of time. The HRA consists of three components: (1) an intake instrument; (2) comparison of patient data with normed data and weighting of patient data to estimate risk; and (3) an individual risk appraisal or output instrument. Users of the tool advocate that best results occur when the HRA is used in combination with other strategies such as health counseling and peer support. For the nurse, an overview of available tools and criteria for tool selection was discussed as well as pros and cons of the instrument. A model was presented that incorporated the use of HRAs with health contracting and health monitoring to assist motivated patients making long-term lifestyle changes. The professional nurse was urged to use and adapt this powerful tool to various practice settings.