Perception and performance of the nursing team in caring for patients with suicide behavior

Objective: to understand the perception and performance of the Nursing team in a hospital emergency service in the care of patients after attempting suicide. Methods: exploratorystudy, with a qualitative approach, carried out through semi-structured interviews with Nursing professionals who work in an Emergency Service. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed as to their content following Bardin's thematic model. Results: seven nurses and four Nursing technicians participated in the study, with an average age of 36 years, most of them female. Suicide attempts are often associated with 'psychic pain' that is opposed to the principles of life preservation; such an attitude has caused suicidal behavior to be misinterpreted by health professionals. Conclusion: most professionals demonstrated a stereotyped 'pre-concept' and full of taboos about patients who attempted suicide, which triggered a service more directed to physical needs and protocol formalities. Few professionals reported carrying out holistic and empathic care, which is so necessary for these people. In this sense, the importance and urgency of training the team in the identification of suicide risks and in the continuity of treatment of surviving individuals is emphasized.

Modified critical care and treatment space considerations for mass casualty critical illness and injury.

Mass critical care events are increasingly likely, yet the resource challenges to augment everyday, unrestricted critical care for a surge of disaster victims are insurmountable for nearly all communities. In light of these limitations, an expert panel defined a circumscribed set of key critical care interventions that they believed could be offered to many additional people and yet would also continue to offer substantial life-sustaining benefits for nonmoribund critically ill and injured people. They proposed Emergency Mass Critical Care, which is based on the set of key interventions and includes recommendations for necessary surge medical equipment, treatment space characteristics, and staffing competencies for mass critical care response. To date, Emergency Mass Critical Care is untested, and the real benefits of implementation remain uncertain. Nonetheless, Emergency Mass Critical Care currently remains the only comprehensive construct for mass critical care preparedness and response. This paper reviews current concepts to provide life-sustaining care for hundreds or thousands of people outside of traditional critical care sites.

Hurricane Katrina and the healthcare infrastructure: A focus on disaster preparedness, response, and resiliency.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina provides a window of opportunity to address a frail and failing healthcare system. Katrina was the rare incident that disrupted the external systems supplying hospitals with key services and resources needed for the organizations to function; increased the number of patients, both present and expected, that required medical care; and affected directly the physical plants of the hospitals, challenging their functionality. Sorting through and gleaning useful lessons to increase the resilience of hospitals for this type of catastrophic incident will take time and will require system-wide public health planning and intervention. In this article, the authors focus on how hospitals prepared for, responded to, and coped with Katrina. They also provide a brief overview of the current situation and the healthcare crisis confronting hospitals and communities in the region affected by Katrina and discuss the impending need to develop disaster-resilient medical and healthcare systems. Planning, access to adequate resources, networking, effective communication and coordination, and training and education of doctors, nurses, technicians, and medical staff are essential in the development of a resilient healthcare infrastructure that will be able to provide the much needed services to populations affected by future disasters.

Packaged hospitals get second chance in the Third World.

They're products of the Cold War that fortunately were never needed. Prepackaged disaster hospitals, civilian M.A.S.H. units containing everything needed to create a 200-bed hospital except an exterior structure, have been packed away in crates since the '50s and '60s. But the hospitals-in-a-box are being shipped to less-developed countries where even the 30-year-old equipment often is a big improvement over what's currently available.