Jeanne P. Sewell

Assessing and Selecting Data for a Nursing Services Dashboard

Nurse leaders are held accountable for staffing decisions and quality outcomes, sometimes without proper decision support tools. A nursing services dashboard can provide information to guide staffing decisions for positive outcomes. The authors examine the sources, attributes, and uses of administrative data to assist nurse leaders to make informed decisions in selecting data for inclusion in their nursing services dashboard.

Nursing program assessment and evaluation: evidence-based decision making improves outcomes.

The authors explore how an evidence-based decision-making process improved National Council Licensure Examination passing rates for a bachelor of science in nursing program. The process is one that may be applicable to other nursing programs despite differences in school mission, philosophy, and student population. The essential components of a nursing program that contribute to student success are examined. Lessons learned and opportunities for more comprehensive pertinent assessment methods are discussed.

Zotero: harnessing the power of a personal bibliographic manager.

Zotero is a powerful free personal bibliographic manager (PBM) for writers. Use of a PBM allows the writer to focus on content, rather than the tedious details of formatting citations and references. Zotero 2.0 (http://www.zotero.org) has new features including the ability to synchronize citations with the off-site Zotero server and the ability to collaborate and share with others. An overview on how to use the software and discussion about the strengths and limitations are included.

Getting the most from your software: using Excel as the poor man's database.

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Data aggregation: a case study.

The writing of this article and the case study discussed within were not supported by a grant or any other source. The article developed out of the problems encountered in the database construction project, as discussed in the case study. The transition to the use of electronic health records (EHRs) and other software to capture care has opened new opportunities for nursing to improve healthcare outcomes. Nursing care data that are captured using technology can be aggregated, analyzed, and benchmarked with desktop spreadsheet and database software to improve the healthcare delivery system. Nurses who document patient care electronically may be unaware that they are entering data into databases or the potential benefits from extracting and using these data to analyze and improve nursing care. The purpose of this article was to present the potential for improving care using the data that are created in an electronic record as well as provide an overview of some of the problems associated with using these data. A case study will be used to illustrate how noninteroperable systems create difficulties that require manual interventions before using the data. Additionally, the formatting difficulties caused by lack of knowledge about how data should be formatted when being imported into a database are discussed. This case study is not unique to a given healthcare agency. The experiences that are discussed are universal. The specifics of the study were intentionally not discussed because the focus of the article is to reveal the challenges and opportunities involved with secondary use of data to improve the quality of care we deliver to patients.

Creating a bibliography with Microsoft Word 2007 and 2008.

Whether writing a report for work, school, or publication, citing references is often a drudgery that most of us prefer to avoid. The good news is that there are software solutions that make citation notations and bibliography creation easy. The software solutions allow the user, while writing a paper, to create a database with all of the criteria necessary for citing commonly used resources such as journal articles, books, and Web sites. When the paper is done, a click of the mouse will insert the citations in the marked spot and create a reference list according to the selected format, for example, American Psychological Association (APA) or MLA. These reference databases are called personal bibliographic managers (PBMs) or a personal reference manager. Microsoft Word 2007 (Microsoft, Redmond, WA) for the PC and Word 2008 for the Apple Mac (Apple Computer, Cupertino, CA) have added a PBM as one of their new features. The purpose of this article was to explain how to use these Word PBMs. Instructions are provided for Word 2007 with corresponding instructions for Word 2008 in parentheses. Limitations of the Word PBM and alternative solutions are also discussed.