Nursing interventions for adults following a mental health crisis: A systematic review guided by trauma-informed principles.

There exists a growing need for health and service providers to respond to persons in a manner that recognizes the prevalence and impact of trauma in individuals and prevent inadvertent re-traumatization in the routine process of care. The experience of mental health crisis in of itself can have traumatic and impactful effects on individuals. Trauma-informed approaches to care offer a framework to provide crisis intervention responses that are based on the acknowledgement of the prevalence and impact of trauma and define trauma not by the event per se, but by the impact of an experience of trauma. The integration of trauma-informed principles in the context of crisis intervention is a current practice gap. In order to inform a portion of a best-practice guideline for registered nurses and the interprofessional team, a systematic literature review was conducted to primarily identify nursing interventions within four weeks of a mental health crisis, with a secondary focus on identifying particular interventions that included trauma-informed principles. The systematic review yielded 21 quantitative and qualitative studies related to nursing interventions for mental health crisis, 10 of which referred to one or more principles of trauma-informed approaches. There was a lack of studies on nursing interventions explicitly linked to implementation of trauma-informed principles, highlighting future research needs and focused efforts to integrate trauma-informed principles into crisis intervention practices.

Seventy Years of RN Effectiveness: A Database Development Project to Inform Best Practice.

BACKGROUND: The appropriate nursing staff mix is imperative to the provision of quality care. Nurse staffing levels and staff mix vary from country to country, as well as between care settings. Understanding how staffing skill mix impacts patient, organizational, and financial outcomes is critical in order to allow policymakers and clinicians to make evidence-informed staffing decisions. AIMS: This paper reports on the methodology for creation of an electronic database of studies exploring the effectiveness of Registered Nurses (RNs) on clinical and patient outcomes, organizational and nurse outcomes, and financial outcomes. METHODS: Comprehensive literature searches were conducted in four electronic databases. Inclusion criteria for the database included studies published from 1946 to 2016, peer-reviewed international literature, and studies focused on RNs in all health-care disciplines, settings, and sectors. Masters-prepared nurse researchers conducted title and abstract screening and relevance review to determine eligibility of studies for the database. High-level analysis was conducted to determine key outcomes and the frequency at which they appeared within the database. RESULTS: Of the initial 90,352 records, a total of 626 abstracts were included within the database. Studies were organized into three groups corresponding to clinical and patient outcomes, organizational and nurse-related outcomes, and financial outcomes. Organizational and nurse-related outcomes represented the largest category in the database with 282 studies, followed by clinical and patient outcomes with 244 studies, and lastly financial outcomes, which included 124 studies. LINKING EVIDENCE TO ACTION: The comprehensive database of evidence for RN effectiveness is freely available at https://rnao.ca/bpg/initiatives/RNEffectiveness. The database will serve as a resource for the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario, as well as a tool for researchers, clinicians, and policymakers for making evidence-informed staffing decisions.