Complementary therapies: a challenge for nursing practice.

There has been a vast increase in the use of complementary therapies in recent years. Nurses, who are at the forefront of healthcare delivery, require adequate knowledge of complementary therapies and the skills to provide appropriate advice and holistic care incorporating the individual's physical, psychological, social and emotional wellbeing and needs. This article explores the use and development of complementary therapies in health care. The role of, and the need for, an enhanced education approach to expand the current body of knowledge is discussed.

"On Edge All the Time": Mixed-Status Households Navigating Health Care Post Arizona's Most Stringent Anti-immigrant Law.

Arizona's state-level policies restricting undocumented immigrants' access to public benefits continue to have implications on mixed-status households' accessibility to care. More notably, the effects of prolonged stress, anxiety and trauma remain unaddressed whilst mental health services continue to be absent. This article examines the healthcare experiences of mixed-status households after Arizona's SB1070 ("Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act") was passed. Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (SB1070) was state legislation empowering police to detain individuals unable to prove their citizenship upon request. Of particular interest is how households navigate accessibility to care when members have varied immigration statuses, hence, varied healthcare availability. Interviews with 43 households in Tucson, Arizona, 81% of which had at least one undocumented member, reveal barriers and promoters to care. Barriers include complexity of applications, fear and trepidation in seeking care. Promoters include discount care programs that are a vital source of care as well as discretionary practices exercised by front-line staff. Findings have implications beyond Arizona as immigrants settle in new destination states while the current Trump administration borrows from Arizona's anti-immigrant policies.

The border community and immigration stress scale: a preliminary examination of a community responsive measure in two Southwest samples.

Understanding contemporary socio-cultural stressors may assist educational, clinical and policy-level health promotion efforts. This study presents descriptive findings on a new measure, the border community and immigration stress scale. The data were from two community surveys as part of community based participatory projects conducted in the Southwestern US border region. This scale includes stressful experiences reflected in extant measures, with new items reflecting heightened local migration pressures and health care barriers. Stressors representing each main domain, including novel ones, were reported with frequency and at high intensity in the predominantly Mexican-descent samples. Total stress was also significantly associated with mental and physical health indicators. The study suggests particularly high health burdens tied to the experience of stressors in the US border region. Further, many of the stressors are also likely relevant for other communities within developed nations also experiencing high levels of migration.

The Beck depression inventory-II in adolescent mental health patients: cut-off scores for detecting depression and rating severity.

The Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition (BDI-II) was developed as an indicator of the presence and severity of depression in psychiatric patients from age 13. Its cut-off scores were derived from an adult sample and differentiate four categories of severity but contain no screening cut-off score for classifying patients as depressed vs. nondepressed. We aimed to determine this screening cut-off score and to examine the utility of the severity cut-off scores for adolescents in mental health care. 88 adolescent psychiatric patients (13-16 years, 58% female) completed the German BDI-II. A structured diagnostic interview served as the reference standard for computing receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and identified 24 adolescents (27%) as depressed. ROC analysis of depressed vs. nondepressed patients yielded an area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.93. The optimal screening cut-off score according to Youden's Index was ≥23, where sensitivity was 0.88 and specificity was 0.92. The severity cut-off scores yielded satisfying sensitivity (≥0.89) and specificity (≥0.72) for mild and moderate but not for severe depression. Our findings indicate that the BDI-II can be recommended for screening for depressive disorders in adolescent mental health patients. However, the currently used severity cut-off scores may be suboptimal for this population.