The use of an advanced medical-surgical course for the retention and professional development of medical-surgical nurses in an acute care hospital.

The retention and professional development of the medical-surgical nurse is a challenging endeavor. Voluntary nurse turnover affects the collective costs of direct and indirect recruiting, productivity and training, and termination. These costs are estimated to be 0.75 to 1.30 times a nurse's average departing salary. The multifactorial dimensions of nursing retention remain a challenge for leaders at the organizational level. This article describes an educational strategy in the form of an advanced medical-surgical course used by a multicampus academic community Magnet® hospital to increase the retention and professional development of medical-surgical nurses. The authors report the goals, content, and outcomes of this advanced medical-surgical course.

The merry-go-round of patient rounding: assure your patients get the brass ring.

Staff members on a medical-surgical unit in a large community teaching hospital adapted the hourly rounding concept to their specific patient population. Lessons learned and strategies to assure continuous success with the rounding process are addressed.

Behavioural fever in infected honeybees: parasitic manipulation or coincidental benefit?

Infection by a parasite often induces behavioural changes in the host and these changes may benefit either the host or the parasite. However, whether these changes are active host defence mechanisms or parasitic manipulations or simply incidental byproducts of the infection is not always clear. It has been suggested that understanding the proximate mechanisms of these changes as well as comparative studies could help distinguish these alternatives better. Behavioural fever is a common response to an infection in many animals and we investigated the phenomenon in the novel host-parasite relationship between the honeybee and the temperature-sensitive microsporidian Nosema ceranae. Our results show that infected bees prefer higher temperatures and even though this seems to benefit the pathogen, the proximate mechanism underlying this change is the pathological stress underlying the infection. Especially because it is a new host-parasite relationship, it is best to label the observed behavioural change as a case of incidental benefit although this does not rule out selection acting on it. We discuss the importance of looking at the behavioural outcomes of host-parasite relationships and the importance of studying them at multiple levels for understanding their origin and maintenance.