Finding meaning in illness. Can nurses help?
They are common comments from people facing a life-threatening or chronic illness: "Why did this happen to me? I don't deserve this." "Am I being punished for something? Why do I have to go through this?"
Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to V Poole.
They are common comments from people facing a life-threatening or chronic illness: "Why did this happen to me? I don't deserve this." "Am I being punished for something? Why do I have to go through this?"
Growing old is not what it used to be. Many self-care actions can enhance one's chance of growing old without illness or disease. This necessitates preparing for old age while one is young. Preparation for second adulthood can vastly improve physical and emotional health in old age. It is important that nurses and other health care professionals teach health promotion strategies to persons at all ages in order to assist individuals to live life to its fullest throughout their lifetime.
There are may factors to consider when denial is encountered in a patient situation. Denial is a simple concept but is complicated by ego-maintaining mechanisms that denial may produce. It is important to evaluate each individual situation in order to identify suitable approaches for the situation. Denial may not be something that the nurse should take away since it can serve an important balancing function between depression and wellness.
Obtaining a nursing position is often the first challenge for the graduate nurse. Understanding the interview process and making a plan that will ensure the graduate is placed in the best possible light is important for success in the interview process. This paper discusses getting ready for the interview, setting up the interview, dressing for the interview, the actual interview and following up the interview. Adherence to these guidelines can facilitate the graduate's success in obtaining the desired position.
Change is a significant concept in health care. It is critical that health care professionals understand change dynamics and implement strategies to adapt to the changes in the modern workplace.
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Many employees and managers alike dread annual performance evaluations. However, there is a way to get past the "dread" factor. Annual performance evaluations can be a positive experience and even motivational. They can be a time for affirming good work of the past year and planning together what will be accomplished in the year to follow. By keeping employees informed of the larger picture, helping them to see how they fit in, involving them in setting performance objectives, dealing with performance problems as they arise, and noticing when they have achieved their objectives can make evaluation a positive experience.
Guidelines for the construction and development of tests of remote memory are provided. These guidelines follow from methodological considerations and from certain theoretical issues we believe that remote memory tests should address if they are to further our understanding of amnesia. These include: the pattern of temporal gradient; memory for different broad classes of information such as famous names and famous events; and recall and recognition of different types of detail such as contextual and non-contextual information associated with remote memory. With respect to the first of these, we argue that it is impossible to fully evaluate competing hypotheses about temporally graded retrograde amnesia unless items are selected from at least two difficulty levels, and from at least two time periods. The construction of two equivalent tests of remote memory, one for famous people, the other for famous events, is described, and the theoretical issues listed earlier were addressed using these tests in a study comparing the remote memory of 13 organic amnesics and 13 age- and IQ-matched controls. The principal findings were as follows. There was only weak evidence that amnesics' remote memory for famous people and events was temporally graded over a 20 year period, and recognition memory and memory for non-contextual detail were equally impaired. Mayes, Meudell, and Pickering's (1985) context memory deficit hypothesis was supported, however, because amnesics were more impaired in their ability to date recognised items. In addition, although there was little support for a temporally graded retrograde impairment on the recognition question, there was much clearer evidence for the temporal dating question. Also, one patient, SR, showed a selective deficit in dating recognised names and events from the 1980s. Finally, the correlations between measures of anterograde and retrograde amnesia were all non-significant. Suitable items for the construction of remote memory tests probing the four decades 1950s to 1980s are presented. A subset of these, from the 1970s and 1980s, were shown to have satisfactory psychometric qualities, and can therefore be recommended for more widespread clinical use, although more extensive normative data than that provided here will be necessary.
Twelve amnesics with various aetiologies were compares with 12 matched control subjects on a task which examined the increase in reading speed for lists of words and pronounceable non-words that were shown several times and read twice during a training phase. After a four minute delay the reading speed for the primed lists was compared with that for an equal number of umprimed lists. No non-specific practice effects were observed. The amnesics showed an equal proportional increase in reading speed for primed words list to that of their controls, and, if anything, a slightly greater reading speed increase for non-words. These effects were found even when an amnesic subgroup, selected because its baseline reading speed was closely matched to that of the controls, was used for the comparison. The patients' preserved priming for the novel information found in the non-word list reading task occurred in conjunction with very impaired free recall for the contents of the lists. The effects occurred in patients of all aetiologies used in the study and confirm and extend the findings of Moscovitch, Winocur and McLachlan (1986).