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University of Virginia officials will use a Washington, D.C.-area husband and wife's $5 million gift to double the size of a program that allows people with college degrees in other fields to get a master’s in nursing in two years. With the gift, UVA's clinical nurse leader program will go from 48 to 96 students.

As the health care landscape changes and new care delivery models such as accountable care organizations and medical homes become more common, offering greater career possibilities for nurses.

The Health Care Innovations Exchange created by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to speed the implementation of new and better ways of delivering health care, now includes more than 700 successful nursing innovations implemented around the country.

The majority of U.S. school districts fail to meet recommended nurse-to-student ratios despite the growing number of children needing complex care. With increased access to the classroom and a rise in the numbers of children living with diabetes, allergies and other chronic conditions, school nurses are more responsible than ever for a wide range of daily care.

A report by World Health Organization, University of California, Los Angeles School of Nursing shows nursing, midwifery can have major impact on lifestyle changes, health outcomes.

The National Association of Neonatal Nurses and the American Nurses Association have released a new second edition of Neonatal Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice. This guide to contemporary neonatal practice contains updated standards by which all RNs in neonatal nursing are held accountable.

Oregon Health & Science University has hired Susan Bakewell-Sachs, PhD, RN, APRN, BC, as dean of its School of Nursing and vice president for nursing affairs. Bakewell-Sachs formerly served as program director for the New Jersey Nursing Initiative, a program sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that addressed the nursing shortage and other concerns.

Although monitor alarms are designed to help keep patients safe, the biggest risk they pose today is alarm fatigue caused by the sheer number of alarms bombarding hospital staff. This sensory overload can cause staff to become desensitized, resulting in delayed alarm response or missed alarms.

Xerox has created a system capable of keeping track of both nurses and medications that have been ordered for their patients. The system’s core relies on a small digital tag which the nurse would wear, allowing the system to recognize whenever he or she enters a patient’s room.

In addition to offering a broad range of health care services, nurse practitioners save taxpayer expenditures across the board. Nurse practitioner clinics bill around 80 percent of what doctors normally bill, resulting in substantial savings in costs per patient.

Hospitals can save lives by hiring more nurses with bachelor’s degrees, a new study suggests. About 500 deaths among general, orthopedic, and vascular surgery patients in Pennsylvania might have been avoided during the 1999-2005 study period if the number of bachelor’s-level nurses had been 10 percentage points higher, researchers found.

According to a recently released U.S. Census Bureau study of men in nursing, male nurses associated with military and religious orders that were common before the 1800s began a decline in the 1900s. The reason: Laws prohibited some from entering the profession, and some nursing schools refused to admit men.

A nationwide push for nurses with advanced degrees is taking place. In its 2010 report, "The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health," the Institute of Medicine called for doubling the number of doctorate-level nurses by 2020, and the Affordable Care Act’s sweeping changes demand a heavy influx of nurses in leadership roles.

University of Cincinnati is working to improve minority acceptance rates in the College of Nursing. Olivia Smith, a third-year nursing student, started the AMBITION program in October after noticing a lack of diversity in the College of Nursing. “As a minority myself, I realized the problem was minority students not getting accepted into the nursing program,” Smith said. “I felt like young students who had the help of older peers, who had been through the same classes, would be more likely to get into the college.”

When hospitals hire more nurses with four-year degrees, patient deaths following common surgeries decrease, according to a new study.

The U.S. faces a shortage of more than 13,000 physicians, a gap expected to grow to 130,000 by 2025, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Yet doctors’ groups, led by the American Medical Association, are fighting efforts by nurse practitioners to take on more responsibility, arguing that care will be compromised unless doctors supervise.

A new report by the National Institute for Health Care Reform digs into a topic of increasingly heated debate in health care — the role of nurse practitioners in addressing an anticipated shortage of primary care physicians.

The House on Tuesday passed a measure that would let nurse practitioners prescribe certain drugs without a collaborative agreement with a physician.

Recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey shows the number of male nurses increasing and a gender pay gap that favors men. Nursing is still dominated by women, but the number of men in the field has been growing since the 1970s.

Nurse practitioners say they can do their jobs just fine without doctors, and they’re lobbying lawmakers to end restrictions in more than a dozen of the 34 states that require physician oversight. Despite the need for increased care, doctors are pushing back, fighting for restrictions with their own lobbying efforts as well as with lawsuits across the country, arguing that patients’ basic care is at risk.