Judy Thomas

Empowering, engaging, and retaining qualified nurses are critical healthcare priorities. Why? Nurse retention is directly correlated to healthcare outcomes, and nurse turnover has a negative, multidimensional effect on healthcare organizations. Turnover affects job satisfaction among clinical nurses, which leads to burnout, making it harder for them to provide safe patient care and achieve overall organizational initiatives. Further, the high costs associated with nurse turnover can have a huge impact on a hospital's or health system's profit margin. Improving Nurse Retention & Healthcare Outcomes will help clinical nurses understand how to elevate their practice as frontline care providers and give executives a new, strategic approach to nurse retention. Authors Judy Thomas and Mellisa Renter outline the IMPACT Program they created to stimulate empowerment and professional growth. In addition to explaining the program, how it works, and what it has achieved, this book provides an implementation path to make an immediate impact on nurse empowerment, engagement, and retention. Chapter 1 outlines the retention practices commonly used by most organizations. As you'll see, these practices are often nothing more than short-term fixes. They only see you through the immediate crisis, are quite costly, and offer little return on investment in terms of overall strategic initiatives. Chapter 2 discusses the key stakeholders and instrumental decision points in the creation of our program to improve nurse retention. Chapter 3 takes a high-level look at the structure of the IMPACT Model. Chapters 4-7 offer step-by-step details on each phase of the IMPACT Model. Chapter 8 describes the type of leadership commitment ittakes to start and sustain a program of this magnitude. Chapter 9 explains how we obtained leadership buyin from the get-go to begin the process of developing a program and achieved broader organizational buy-in to sustain it once it was off the ground. Chapter 10 reveals outcomes from specific IMPACT Model projects completed by participating nurses as well as broader organizational gains associated with the IMPACT Model. Chapter 11 showcases the professional journey of clinical nurses as they navigate the program. You will gain a greater perspective on how the IMPACT Model empowers clinical nurses, who spend the majority of their time on the front lines. Appendix A: Includes our full Explanation of Activities forms. Appendix B: Offers full-page forms discussed earlier in the book

A look at how life has changed in the Oxfordshire town of Abingdon since the last century and beyond, contrasting old pictures with the corresponding scene today. The photographs, many previously unpublished, include not only streets and buildings, but also images of people going about their daily lives, then and now.

Abortion has been at the emotional centre of America's culture wars for a generation. Ever since the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion has in many ways defined American politics, creating an ideological demilitarized zone between liberals and conservatives. Above all, the twenty-five-year war over abortion has been responsible for the most significant social phenomenon of our times,the political and cultural mobilization of Evangelical America. Furthermore, it has served as the lightning rod for the most intense and prolonged debate on the issue of separation of church and state since the founding of the nation. Now for the first time, in a compelling and very human narrative, Wrath of Angels traces the rise and fall of the American anti-abortion movement and reveals its critical role in the creation of the Religious Right. The book explores why the passionate battle to end abortion failed to achieve its goal and yet in the process became one of the most important,and least understood,social protest movements of the twentieth century. The anti-abortion movement was the catalyst that convinced Protestant fundamentalists to end their long cultural isolation, leaving their church pews for the streets. And, while they failed to change the law, they were transformed themselves, emerging as one for the most potent political forces in America at the end of the century. James Risen, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and Judy L. Thomas, a reporter for the Kansas City Star, are widely acknowledged as the leading journalistic experts on the anti-abortion movement. Their narrative history captures all the drama of the abortion battles of the past twenty-five years and reveals how a movement with its roots in the Catholic left's antiwar protests of the 1960s was gradually transformed into a rallying point for the newly muscular Religious Right. Wrath of Angels documents the origins of the use of civil disobedience in the anti-abortion movement and offers the definitive explanation of why the movement ultimately descended into violence,and collapsed as a political force. It tells the compelling story of the shootings of abortion doctors in the 1990s and draws upon exclusive interviews with the anti-abortion extremists who have been convicted of these crimes. Anti-abortion activism represents the largest social protest movement since the 1960s. With clarity and objectivity, Risen and Thomas unleash the stormy wrath of angels, the volatile eruption of fundamentalist fury into American politics.