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The COVID-19 pandemic impacted every aspect of the personal and professional lives of healthcare providers. Nursing professional development practitioners are challenged with ongoing classroom education, new hire onboarding, and just-in-time education for staff. This article is intended to present the unique challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic placed on nursing professional development practitioners in a large academic medical center and how opportunities presented to revise old education practices.

Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the Web as a driver of polarization. In order to further our understanding of the factors behind online polarization, in the present work we collect and analyze Web browsing histories of tens of thousands of users alongside careful measurements of the time spent browsing various news sources. We show that online news consumption follows a polarized pattern, where users' visits to news sources aligned with their own political leaning are substantially longer than their visits to other news sources. Next, we show that such preferences hold at the individual as well as the population level, as evidenced by the emergence of clear partisan communities of news domains from aggregated browsing patterns. Finally, we tackle the important question of the role of user choices in polarization. Are users simply following the links proffered by their Web environment, or do they exacerbate partisan polarization by intentionally pursuing like-minded news sources? To answer this question, we compare browsing patterns with the underlying hyperlink structure spanned by the considered news domains, finding strong evidence of polarization in partisan browsing habits beyond that which can be explained by the hyperlink structure of the Web.

More nurses without critical care experience are being hired by intensive care units. Eleven newly hired nurses participated in a phased program designed to improve the efficiency of intensive care unit orientation. A pre–post implementation design demonstrated that although there was a 14% reduction in orientation time, there were no statistically significant changes in new hire or preceptor satisfaction nor in first-year registered nurse turnover rates. Expansion of the program is needed to demonstrate its impact.

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