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Christine R Curran

Publications and source records attributed to Christine R Curran.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Improving the safety of medication administration using an interactive CD-ROM program.

PURPOSE: The impact of an interactive CD-ROM program on the rate of medication administration errors made by nurses was studied. METHODS: This randomized, controlled, nonblinded study was conducted at three community hospitals. Study participants included 30 registered nurses who had at least one year of nursing experience in acute care and who worked on medical or medical-surgical units. Nurses were randomized to an intervention group that completed an interactive CD-ROM program on safe medication practices or to a control group. Direct observation was used to determine the baseline (preintervention) and postintervention error rates for both study and control groups. Three categories of errors were defined: deviation from safe administration practices (core 1), preparation and administration errors (core 2), and deviations from prescribed therapy (core 3). An error rate was calculated for each nurse, and the error rates for the study and control groups were based on the average error rate for the nurses in each group. RESULTS: The majority of errors made were core 1 errors. The nurse-level data showed a significant decrease in core 1 error rates between baseline and postintervention periods. Core 2 error rates were higher in the postintervention period, but the increase was not significant. Very few core 3 errors were made by either group during either period. CONCLUSION: An interactive CD-ROM enabled nurses to apply the information learned to identify errors in medication administration and improved adherence to safe medication administration practices.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Informatics competencies for nurse practitioners.

Informatics knowledge and skills are essential if clinicians are to master the large volume of information generated in healthcare today. Thus, it is vital that informatics competencies be defined for nursing and incorporated into both curricula and practice. Staggers, Gassert, and Curran have defined informatics competencies for four general levels of nursing practice. However, informatics competencies by role (eg, those specific for advanced practice nursing) have not been defined and validated. This article presents an initial proposed list of informatics competencies essential for nurse practitioner education and practice. To this list, derived from the work of Staggers et al., 1 has been added informatics competencies related to evidence-based practice. Two nurse informaticists and six nurse practitioners, who are program directors, were involved in the development of the proposed competencies. The next step will be to validate these competencies via research.

Clinical Competence↗
PubMed2002

Economic evidence for evidence-based practice.

PURPOSE: To explicate (a) the types of economic analyses available to nurses, (b) the measurement of costs in different types of economic evaluations, (c) recommendations for standardization, and (d) the assessment of economic evaluations for evidence-based practice. METHODS: Five types of economic analyses are reviewed. Recommendations for standardization of cost-effectiveness analyses are included as well as a worksheet for use in critiquing economic evaluations for validity and applicability to clinical settings. FINDINGS: Limited knowledge and a lack of consistent approaches to economic analyses are evident in the nursing and health care literature. However, nurses have not contributed to the conduct of rigorous economic evaluations or research to the extent found in other health care disciplines. CONCLUSIONS: Basing nursing practice on the best available evidence is now the expected standard of care. Applying economic evidence to practice requires understanding the methods used to conduct economic evaluations and to analyze the rigor of such evaluations.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Columbia University's competency and evidence-based Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Program.

New clinical information is being generated faster than practicing clinicians can effectively assimilate it. Since the gold standard of clinical information is evidence-based information, tools and techniques that facilitate both the building of evidence for practice and the application of evidence to practice are essential for practicing clinicians. As such, the Acute Care Nurse Practitioner (ACNP) program at Columbia University's School of Nursing was reconfigured to incorporate both theoretically based competency evaluation standards and strategies to foster an evidence-based practice approach to clinical care. The purpose of this article is to describe a curriculum and set of learning activities used to foster both development of clinical competency and evidence-based practice in students in the Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program.

Curriculum↗