Penn Medicine News Blog Archive: Nursing

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...