Determining critical incident nursing interventions for the critical care setting: a pilot study

Critical incidents in nursing academics: discovering a new identity

OBJECTIVE

a qualitative study that followed the principles of the grounded theory in order to analyze the professional identity of nursing academics through the analysis of the most disturbing critical incidents.

METHOD

semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven nurses who worked as professors and researchers in a private university in Barcelona.

RESULTS

the resulting empirical material was organized into two categories: characterization of critical incidents and responsiveness to the incident.

CONCLUSION

the professional identity of nurses regarding the academic area is still under construction and inexperience is the major obstacle in the management of critical incidents in the teaching career.

Nursing Interventions in the Clinical Practice of an Intensive Care Unit

This cross-sectional study was carried out at a university hospital to describe the nursing interventions most frequently performed in the clinical practice of an intensive care unit, based on nursing care prescriptions, and to investigate their similarity to the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC). The sample consisted of 991 hospitalizations of patients. Data were retrospectively collected from the computer database and analyzed through descriptive statistics and cross-mapping. A total of 57 different NIC interventions frequently used in the unit were identified; most of them in the complex (42%) and basic physiological (37%) domains, in the classes ‘respiratory management’ and ‘self-care facilitation’. Similarity between the nursing care prescribed and nursing interventions/NIC was found in 97.2% of the cases. The conclusion is that the interventions/NIC used in the clinical practice of this intensive care unit reflects the level of complexity of nursing care, which is mainly directed at the regulation of the body’s physical and homeostatic functioning.