The Roles and Contributions of Certified Transport Registered Nurses in Critical Care Ground Transport Today.

Registered nurses are core members of critical care ground transport teams because of their education, experience, and scope of practice. Advances in medicine, technology, and equipment, combined with regionalization of specialized care and, most recently, the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, necessitate that transport nurses possess specialized knowledge, skills, and abilities. National specialty certification in ground transport nursing via the Certified Transport Registered Nurse (CTRN) offers registered nurses a process to validate their expertise. The most recent transport nursing role delineation study, which was conducted by the Board of Certification for Emergency Nursingin 2019, provided the foundation for the revised CTRN examination content outline, which is now separate from the Certified Flight Registered Nurse (CFRN) content outline. In this article, we provide a brief history of the specialty of ground transport nursing; details on the CTRN examination blueprint; and a composite patient case report to illustrate the ground-specific role, expertise, and contributions of the CTRN in delivering the highest level of patient care during ground transport.

Reliability and reproducibility of clinic and home blood pressure measurements in hypertensive women according to age and ethnicity.

BACKGROUND: The purposes of this study were to establish the reproducibility and reliability of clinic and home blood pressure readings and to determine whether correlations differed according to age and ethnicity. METHODS: Blood pressure readings taken in a clinical setting and at home from 161 hypertensive women who were either younger or older (including 91 White American and 61 African-American) were compared with 24-h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) readings (considered the gold standard of blood pressure measurement). RESULTS: Bland-Altman statistical method showed good levels of agreement between clinic blood pressures measured 30 days apart, and blood pressures measured at home in the morning over a 30-day program, when compared with mean 24-h ABPM readings. On examining individual Bland-Altman plots for younger and older women, White American and African-American women's blood pressures were well correlated for home measures and 24-h ABPM readings. The correlation between daytime systolic home blood pressure readings and systolic 24-h ABPM readings was much stronger for White American women (r=0.75) than for African-American women (r=0.57). There were also correlation differences in mean systolic blood pressure between home blood pressure readings and 24-h ABPM readings according to age (r=0.66 for younger and r=0.72 for older). CONCLUSION: These results support current research findings that home blood pressure measurements are reliable when compared with 24-h ABPM readings both in African-American and White women.