Smith, Lisa
Rural Critical Care Nurses’ Suggestions for Decreasing End-of-Life Care Obstacles
Faculty Mentor: Renea L. Beckstrand, PhD, RN, CCRN, CNE College of Nursing

Our research focused on gathering a rural cross-sectional, survey which will help determine the direction to move to improve the End-Of-Life care given by rural critical care nurses. The first step of our research was looking up over 1,300 rural hospitals names, addresses, phone numbers, and number of nursing staff at each hospital across the United States. I and another teammate were assigned to this task, and spent most of our research time completing it.

Once we found our selected hospitals, we sent out to each hospital an adapted our survey from 2 of Dr. Beckstrand’s previous research surveys for each rural critical care nurse to fill out. The nurses will be asked to provide one suggestion for improving End-Of-Life care in rural hospitals. We are currently still in the waiting process of receiving the surveys back from the rural hospitals.

Once we receive all the surveys back from the hospitals, we will be able to input all of their responses into a Word data base and analyze it for content and themes.