Wrist guards reduce the risk of wrist injuries among snowboarders. For every 50 snowboarders who were a wrist guard, one wrist injury will be averted. Future research should focus on determining the optimal type of wrist guard and if they increase the risk of other upper extremity injuries.

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Background: Health promotion and disease prevention have been increasingly recognized as activities that may be within the scope of emergency medicine. The purpose of this feasibility study was to identify health risks and offer immediate interventions to adult patients who have drug and/or alcohol problems, incomplete immunization, are overdue for a Pap (Papanicolaou) smear, and/or are smokers. Methods: The study took place in a busy tertiary Emergency Department (ED) serving an inner-city population with a significant proportion of patients who are homeless, substance abusers, working poor, and/or recent immigrants. A convenience sample of patients completed a computer-based health-risk survey. Trained health promotion nurses offered appropriate interventions to patients following review and discussion of their self-reported data. Interventions included counseling for problem drinking, substance abuse, and smoking cessation, screening for cervical cancer, and immunization. Results: From October 20, 2000 to June 30, 2003, we enrolled 2366 patients. One thousand and eleven subjects (43%) reported substance abuse and 1095 (46%) were smokers. Of the 158 smokers contacted in follow-up, 19 (12%) had quit, 63 (40%) had reduced the number of cigarettes/day and 76 (48%) reported no change. Of 1248 women surveyed, 307 (25%) were overdue for a Pap smear and 54 (18%) received this intervention. Forty-four percent of subjects were overdue for at least one immunization and of those, 414 (40%) were immunized in the ED. Conclusion: At-risk patients can be identified using a computer-based screening tool, and appropriate interventions can be given to a proportion of these patients in a busy inner city ED without increasing wait time.

The intensity of physician workload has been increasing with the well-documented changes in the financing, organization and delivery of care. It is possible that these stressors have reached a point where they pose a serious policy issue for the entire healthcare system through their diminution of physician's ability to effectively interact with patients as they are burned out, stressed and dissatisfied. This policy question is framed in a conceptual model linking workloads with five key outcomes (patient care quality, individual performance, absenteeism, turnover and organizational performance) mediated by physician stress and satisfaction. This model showed a good fit to the data in a structural equation analysis. Ten of the 12 hypothesized pathways between variables were significant and supported the mediating role of stress and satisfaction. These results suggest that workloads, stress and satisfaction have significant and material impacts on patient care quality, individual performance, absenteeism, turnover and organizational performance. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.

Background: Public health advocacy is central to the work of many health professionals, including nurses. Although deemed to be a core competency for public health practitioners, courses described in the literature often lack a focus on experiential learning, which is an essential component to acquiring public health advocacy skills. Method: This article describes an innovative, 12-week graduate course that provides students with a combination of theory and experiential learning through an opportunity to engage in political advocacy, community mobilization, and media engagement on a current public health issue. Results: An advocacy campaign undertaken by students to increase community access to the overdose reversal medication naloxone is described in light of the current North American overdose epidemic. Key considerations for teaching public health advocacy to facilitate development of nursing courses elsewhere are highlighted. Conclusion: Public health advocacy education is important and needs to be expanded both within the nursing profession and across all disciplines. [ J Nurs Educ . 2019;58(12):698–703.]