Congratulations to the UCI Medical Center!

"UC Irvine Medical Center has been selected as a top hospital by registered nurses who participated in a survey in ADVANCE for Nurses magazine. In its first “Readers’ Choice Survey for Southern California,” ADVANCE asked readers to rank 75 Southern California hospitals in five categories that matter most to the nursing profession: quality of care, organizational culture, professional development, communications and retention efforts. UC Irvine Medical Center and four other hospitals received the highest scores across all five categories and are highlighted in the magazine’s Oct. 29 issue."
Read more: http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1690

Nursing 112 Reserve Item Available in ILC

The resource Mosby's Nursing Skills has been made available in the computers in the ILC for the Nursing Science 112 class (Foundations of Professional Nursing). It can be used by any of the PCs in the ILC. You must bring your activated library card so the ILC can assure that you are UCI students and have a right to access the material.

Some Online Resources: AllNurses.com, NurseLinkUp

I've found a few online resources recently and thought I'd share them (though I am definitely late to this party).

First is AllNurses.com. This is a free online community (though you will need to register to see all the content provided) built to encourage discussion and information sharing of all things nursing. There is career information, forums, global and local (by state) sections, and news (including this unpleasant piece of local news). While AllNurses.com is a good place to get a feel for the profession, it is important to remember that much of what you read in the forums are opinions, and while they may be well-informed opinions, they might not be fact!

Another online resource is NurseLinkUp.com. This resource is also an online community, with more of an emphasis on networking with other professionals and keeping up to date in your career. NurseLinkUp.com has been called "MySpace for nurses." If you join, you'll create your own personal profile and be given space to start a blog, view profiles of other nursing professionals from across the country and be able to contact them, receive syndicated news stories and articles written by NurseLinkUp staff, and more. As with any social networking site, it is important to be careful what information you post online. If you don't want a complete stranger calling your cell phone, don't put that information in your profile. And if you decide to keep a blog, keep in mind the image you'd like to project not just to your current group of friends but also to future employers and colleagues. Don't let this happen to you!

UCI Nursing Resource: NursingConsult

NursingConsult is a product that can help you can use whether you are a first year student or if you’ve worked in the field for 20 years. Students can access classic texts such as Goldman's Cecil Medicine or Ferri's Clinical Advisor, or use the “Drugs” and “Patient Education” sections to find good overviews of pharmaceutical products and disease states. Clinicians can customize patient handouts in English and Spanish, receive customized news stories and clinical updates, perform quick Medline literature searches, and access full-text of 27 journals and 30 books.

Coming in the fall of 2007, NursingConsult will feature new sections, including Practice Guidelines and an Evidence Based Nursing Collection, as well as more full-text book content. Images will also be incorporated into Patient Handouts.

UPDATE: These changes have been made and you can see them when you go to NursingConsult through the UCI Libraries.

Look to the Right!

So, you may have noticed that I've packaged lots of stuff on the right hand side of this blog. Not only the typical stuff (archives, important links, etc.) but also some customized content such as CINAHL search on MRSA (this search should update weekly), Shared items from the Nurse_WannaB Google Reader, and something called del.icio.us. Below is a rundown on what this stuff is and some of the ways it can be used.

CINAHL and PubMed, as you no doubt know, are databases. Both CINAHL and PubMed allow you to save a search as an RSS Feed (RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication). What this means is that rather than going to a database and rerunning a search, and rather than checking for email from the database, you can have the results appear on an aggregator (also called a reader). CommonCraft has a video called RSS In Plain English that describes this process much better than I can. You should watch it!

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. This is similar to using bookmarks or favorites in your browser, except instead of saving your bookmarks on a browser on a specific computer, you can access your bookmarks wherever you have internet access. Also, you can allow others to see your bookmarks, so your colleagues and peers can keep up with your research without you having to write updates! CommonCraft also has a video called Social Bookmarking in Plain English that explains this concept!

I'm putting these elements here partially because there is interesting information listed, but also because I want to show some ways to keep up to date with research/news/colleagues.

UCI Nursing Program Sites

There are many online places you can go for information about your program. One of the most important ones is the UCI Nursing site. From here, you can find information about the program, the faculty, scholarships, organizations (including the Nursing Science Students' Association at UCI), and more. On the more social side of things, you may wish to check out the Facebook group organized by UCI Nursing Science students. Another place that doesn't get promoted very much is the EEE Wiki. This could become an good communication tool for you.

Of course, I would be derelict in my nerdly duties if I didn't mention at least one library-related area, and today that will be the Nursing Subject Guide. This guide, while not an exhaustive list of all nursing-related materials, is a good place to start your search for information.

CINAHL with Full Text

CINAHL is the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature. This is the primary database covering literature specifically written for the nursing and allied health professions. CINAHL is updated weekly, indexes 2,931 journals, and provides full-text for 620 journals. “Indexes journals from the fields of nursing and allied health with indexing back to 1937. Offers complete coverage of English language nursing journals and publications from the National League for Nursing and the American Nurses Association. Covers nursing, biomedicine, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health, and 17 allied health disciplines. In addition, offers access to health care books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of practice, educational software, audiovisuals, book chapters, Evidence Based Care Sheets, legal cases, clinical innovations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments, and clinical trials.”