Penn Medicine News Blog Archive: Nursing

A trauma nurse faces the tragic loss of a young patient close to his own son’s age. A transporter must bring an infant who died in the Neo-ICU down to the morgue. A pharmacist hears that his patient had an anaphylactic reaction to a medication. He discovers the medication allergy...

Members of Rhoads 5 SICU, winners of the Gold Beacon Award Nurses make up the single largest segment of the health-care work force, providing 95 percent of direct care to hospitalized patients. So it’s not surprising that the higher the quality of a hospital’s nursing staff, the better the patient...

No one wants to be in the hospital, but being there during the holidays –- away from family and friends -– makes a difficult situation even harder. That’s why staff at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania go out of their way to bring the holiday spirit into patient...

On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, along with four other hospitals across the nation, have been selected to participate in an initiative to train additional advanced-practice registered nurses (APRN). Nurses with this designation generally have post-graduate training and are able to diagnose illnesses, prescribe medication and treatment regimens, and perform procedures consistent with their scope of practice.

The last thing a patient wants to do after being discharged from outpatient surgery is to try to find an open pharmacy and then wait – in pain -- while a pharmacy fills a prescription. An innovative program in the SurgiCentre at Penn Medicine’s Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine ensures...

Diana Santangelo demonstrates patient wound care to medical student Stuart Carter. Wound care on a patient with diabetic foot ulcers. Pulling together information for a patient discharge. They seem like routine activities in any busy hospital but they often remain hidden from medical students learning the ropes; they’re more apt...

To hospital patients in America, it may seem obvious that their care team – doctors, nurses, technicians, social workers and many other staff – works together to ensure they’re getting proper treatment and monitoring during their stay. But this relationship – often referred to as “interprofessionalism” – has not always been so obvious. Efforts are now under way across the nation to encourage it to flourish in all levels of medical education and hospital care and to foster it in a way that most benefits patients.

On March 27, 2012, 20 nurses from the Ocean Road Cancer Institute (ORCI) in Tanzania graduated from the first ever OncoLink Cancer Nurse Education Program, a pilot program started in February 2011 that aims to provide oncology nursing training in via e-learning courses. The program was created by oncology nursing experts at OncoLink®, a free cancer information website developed by experts at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center.

HUP's Nursing Patient Safety Unit is a simulation set up to highlight common hospital safety issues and errors, sort of like the medical error version of the "What's Wrong?" pictures on the back of Highlights magazine for kids.

Penn Medicine kicked off Patient Safety Awareness Week today, with a plethora of activities and training initiatives designed to get our staff members talking about and learning more about something that’s at the heart of our work here: Keeping patients safe while they’re in our hospitals.

Being hospitalized can be an overwhelming experience for anyone – new places, strange sounds, and complex terminology and decisions. For the elderly, who may already have problems with vision, hearing, memory, as well as physical impairments and limited mobility, a hospital experience can be even more daunting. On top of...