Nurses need to give increased attention to effectively implementing clinical practice guidelines in an effort to meet family members' needs, especially those related to assurance. Assurance may be expressed differently by various cultures.

Barriers and facilitators continue to exist within neonatal end-of-life care. There is significant importance for NICU nurses to recognize and understand the barriers to and facilitators of providing end-of-life care within their specific unit. Further research is warranted regarding implementation of end-of-life care education in the NICU to improve patient care.

Descriptive data were gathered from 15 families on which changes in the family were reported as a result of a myocardial infarction in one family member. Persons surviving their first myocardial infarction and their families were interviewed individually and simultaneously by one of five trained interviewers in each subject's home 6 months after myocardial infarction. Data were analyzed by reduction, display, and comparison of responses. Categories of changes that emerged from the data were those in family and social activities, emotions and personal life-style habits.

Ethnopharmacologic research has revealed that ethnicity significantly affects drug response. Genetic or cultural factors, or both, may influence a given drug's pharmacokinetics (its absorption, metabolism, distribution, and elimination) and pharmacodynamics (its mechanism of action and effects at the target site), as well as patient adherence and education. In addition, the tremendous variation within each of the broader racial and ethnic categories defined by the U.S. Census Bureau (categories often used by researchers) must be considered. Nurses need to become knowledgeable about drugs that are likely to elicit varied responses in people with different ethnic backgrounds, as well as the potential for adverse effects. The existing ethnopharmacologic research focuses primarily on psychotropic and anti-hypertensive agents, as does this article. Cultural assessment of every patient is vital; thus Leininger's Sunrise Model and Giger and Davidhizar's Transcultural Assessment Models are briefly described as well.