Health-related quality of life of primary caregivers of persons with paraplegia.

STUDY DESIGN: A cross-sectional descriptive study was performed with structured questionnaires and interviews conducted with 60 primary caregivers of persons with paraplegia (T1 to S2) owing to traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI). OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was the assessment of the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of primary caregivers of persons with paraplegia owing to traumatic SCI. SETTING: São Paulo, SP, Brazil. METHODS: The HRQoL was assessed by the Short Form-36 (SF-36) health survey questionnaire and caregiver burden was evaluated by the Caregiver Burden Scale (CBS). RESULTS: Among 60 caregivers evaluated, 49 (81.7%) were female, with mean age of 35.8 (SD=12.91) years, 16 (26.6%) being wives and 14 (23.4%) sisters of persons with paraplegia. It was found that the caregivers spend an average of 11.3 h/day caring for individuals with paraplegia. Twenty-three caregivers (38.3%) had a chronic disease and 32 (53.3%) were sole caregivers taking upon themselves the full responsibility of caring for the persons with paraplegia. The subjects reported lower scores on bodily pain and vitality than the other dimensions of the SF-36. The mean global CBS score was 1.71 (SD=0.50) and mean scores for each dimension ranged from 1.39 (SD=0.64) for emotional involvement to 2.44 (SD=0.79) for environment dimension. CONCLUSION: The primary caregivers of spinal cord-injured persons reported low scores on all of the SF-36 and CBS dimensions, bodily pain and vitality being the SF-36 dimensions that received the lowest scores.

Development of nursing CAI in the administration: nursing daily hospital problems.

Since the nurse emerged as a qualified professional to attend human beings, the role which always characterized his/her action was assistance. Already since the foundation of the first nursing school, teaching aimed at developing the student to dispense nursing care necessary for the patient's assistance. When the nurse started to perform their activities in nosocomial and community institutions, the need for someone who would be responsible for the organization, coordination and control of nursing personnel and the Nursing Unit itself, in short, someone who would head the services became apparent. At present, the professional role of the nurse is changing regarding his/her overall assistance to the patient, caring directly, determining and/or carrying out nursing assistance necessary for the patient's health, maintenance or recovery. In this manner, it is necessary for nurses to use tools of administration science such as planning, decision making, and planned changes in order to be able to provide the nursing assistance with quality. Thus, this study aims at helping the development of the nurse's interest in computer during the teaching-learning process, motivating the search for knowledge in computerized sources. We intended to offer the opportunity for discussion and reflection on problems of nosocomial nursing practice, favoring interchange of theory and practice. The system is being developing using ToolBook Live Software to be run in Windows environment. The content of the subject allow the user (student or professional nursing) to choose the most correct answers to questions in the knowledge area. In this case, to discuss nursing administration issues through the study of practical situations is possible, such as the opportunity the verify the performance in tests.

Decision support system for individualized nursing procedures: SAPIEN-Tx.

The present work proposes a Decision Support System for nursing procedures: SAPIEN-Tx. The discussion includes the acquisition, modeling , and implementation of nursing expertise professionals in Renal Transplant. It was developed to obtain better quality healthcare services, as well as an effective contribution to the nursing professional in the global assistance of their clientele. We used the KADS methodology to develop the system knowledge base. This methodology permitted us to perform the knowledge modeling with quality and organization. In opposition to the old method, errors were detected before the implementation, avoiding possible modification on the whole project structure.