Nursing care aims to improve human health and well-being. With the rapid social change and improvement in medical technology, nursing professionals need to adapt to the trends and accompanying health needs in order to provide quality care. In this issue of The Journal of Nursing Research, 11 original research articles are published. In caring for the aging population, Lin, Chan, and Wang noted that delirium was a severe problem and use of medications, dehydration, and shock were related factors for occurrence of delirium among elderly patients in intensive care units. Chang and Sok reported that Korean elderly with hypertension spent more than 8.5 hours a day in sedentary (sitting) behavior, indicating the need for health promotion in the elderly with chronic disease. Increasing late pregnancy is noted in an Iranian study (Behboudi-Gandevani, Ziaie, Farahani, and Jasper) and a Taiwanese study (Shih, Chen, Chiao, Li, Kuo, and Lai). Behboudi-Gandevani et al.'s study explored Iranian women's perspective on delayed childbearing. Shih et al.'s study found that in vitro fertilization/embryo transfer did not cause more stress for women than spontaneous pregnancy during early pregnancy. In the contemporary multicultural and multiethnic society, Lin, Mastel-Smith, Alfred, and Lin reported that Taiwanese nurses rated themselves as not being culturally competent, suggesting the need for related continuing education. There are studies covering nursing education. One showed the multidimensional nature of relationships between nursing students and educators (Heydari, Yaghoubinia, and Roudsari), and the other examined readiness of pediatric critical care nurses on the initiation of a nursing-led feeding protocol (Kirk, Ng, Lee, Ang, and Lee). The results shed light on the design of nursing education. Promoting self-care has been a long tradition in nursing practices; Lee et al.'s study reported that self-care behavior was associated with better glycemic control among adolescents aged 13-18 years with type 1 diabetes (Lee, Lo, Lee, Chen, and Wang). Chen et al.'s study explored caring stress among primary caregivers for children with asthma (Chen, Huang, Yeh, and Tsai). Farsi used grounded theory to explore the meaning of cancer and spiritual responses to the disease among adult patients with acute leukemia. Bagcivan and Akbayrak developed and evaluated a scale, the Turkish-version Oral Chemotherapy Adherence Scale to be used to evaluate adherence to oral agents in the treatment of cancer. We believe that this research could be translated into nursing practices to better fit the needs of the society and promote human health.
The Editor declares no conflicts of interest.
doi:10.1097/jnr.0000000000000136