Doreen NY

You need to keep your papers private and do not share them with other students. You can offer help regarding sentence structure, ideas, punctuation and format but never allow a fellow student to read your paper. It is also possible for a classmate to think they are not copying your paper but in reality they are. Worry about yourself and work to achieve your goal. You do not owe it to anyone to show your work or to help them pass a class. Tutoring is one thing but allowing someone to copy your work could result in terrible consequences for you. This instructor could have failed the both of you. You learned a valuable lesson, take care of number one, you! Good luck with school.

I have great respect for nurses who work with the psychiatric population. Psych nurses need to have an excellent background in medical conditions as well. It is rare to have a psychiatric patient without some coexisting medical condition, be it diabetes, hypertension,heart disease or even pregnancy. All nurses should have excellent assessment skills, being able to predict and deal with emergencies. These patients are heavily medicated and psych nurses need to know how each of these meds affect the physiological functioning of the body. It is due to the astute assessment skills of these nurses, that physicians determine whether psychotropic meds are working or not. Nurses care for their patients on a holistic level, and psych nurses deal with families, work with community agencies and provide limitless education to patients and families. Psych nurses really need to be excellent communicators and it is not as easy as, some people think to talk to someone who is suicidal or depressed, or who refuses to speak at all. Today geriatric psychiatry is a specialty that deals with numerous medical issues, as well as psychiatric conditions. Many nurses feel comfortable performing treatments but are unable to communicate effectively with their patients. Every nursing specialty is unique and beneficial to society. The great thing about nursing is that we are free to chose to work in an area where we can be the most productive. Be proud of what you have achieved and ignore those who are ignorant of what psych nursing is all about.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is an excellent site for keeping up with the latest research. There is a nursing research section that discusses the best evidence based practices. (http://www.ahrq.gov). The National Guideline Clearinghouse (http://www.guideline.gov) is a great site to search for anything from the latest management of otitis media to alternative treatments for back pain. The Joanna Briggs Institue has a nursing research website that is great, but you need to pay a membership fee. I had a membership for several years and it helped me with my advanced classes. Medscape for nurses and nursing net.com are also good sites for evidence based research. I hope you find some of these to be of help.:)

I am sorry to hear that nursing schools are not using nursing diagnoses. Nursing is a science so different from medicine and we should be seen as a unique profession, separate from medicine. I realize that our care revolves around the patients' distress and disease symptoms, but we go beyond that to include their spiritual, emotional, environmental, and social factors, while medicine focuses on their physical condition. I strongly believe that nursing should have its' own criteria for assessing the patient's total needs.

The profession of nursing is always changing and care is based on evidence based protocols. Nursing is always keeping up to date with the latest treatments, technology and medications, so each and every nurse is responsible for keeping his or her practice up to date. Many things that are taught in nursing school become outdated and new and more effective treatments and medications take the place of old ones. Nursing will never be stagnant and we see everyday that nursing research helps to bring forth more effective nursing care. I have been in nursing for 30 years and have had to learn many new nursing techniques, theories and interventions. I think you will find that many new nurses are anxious and afraid of making mistakes. Nursing is never easy but you do become more self assured and confident with experience. Every new learning experience will help a new nurse to improve his or her skills and enable them to function more independently. A nurse never stops learning and if or when a nurse refuses to accept new ways of caring for patients, they will be providing ineffective and poor nursing care. I have had the misfortune to work with some nurses who were stuck in a certain mode of thinking and refused to see how important it is to research and try new interventions based on evidence. It is not right to continue to practice in certain ways just because it's always been done that way. Assessment skills will improve with experience and become second nature, without even thinking that one needs to perform a thorough assessment. Nurses diagnose but these are very different than medical diagnoses. Nursing diagnosis is related to the human condition and based on the individual's total needs. Nurses make diagnoses based on the individual needs and well-being of their patients, and this is done within the nursing framework. This is where a nurse's assessment skills become very important, since they need to be able to identify their patients' actual and potential problems. A medical diagnosis may be congestive heart failure but a nursing diagnosis may be activity intolerance related to shortness of breath. Hopefully a new nurse will be fortunate enough to have peers who value their profession enough to support and teach a new nurse.

Has anyone considered Regis University in Denver Colorado? I just completed the RN to BSN program. It took me 2 and 1/2 years, since the majority of time I took one class every 8 weeks.You can complete your non-nursing classes at the same time that you take your nursing classes. If someone has a BA, then I am sure they don't need to take as many non-nursing classes, as someone with an associate in nursing. I loved the classes and the nursing advisors were excellent. I got a same day response to most of my e-mails and the nursing advisors were always right on target. Regis online was a great experience for me and has definitely contributed to making me a better person in general. The nursing professors were awesome and the other academic professors were great.