ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú

Rural nurses should help maternity policies and protocols that account for the rural practice experience, a concludes. Published in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Journal of Patient Safety, the qualitative study is the first to determine system-level factors affecting rural obstetric nurses when patients experience distress. The system-level factors were resource shortages, the need for teamwork and physicians’ multiple and simultaneous duties, such as seeing patients in the office while other women labor. Other factors were difficulties finding available beds at tertiary care centers and policies that do not consider lower resources, such as requiring two RNs to remove emergency medications from a cabinet. (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Journal of Patient Safety , 2/21/24)