It is time for us to reexamine our former nursing strategies for caring for patients with chronic illness, and seek innovative strategies such as TeenCope utilizing new technology that is available to us.
Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor
It’s embarrassing to admit how many times I’ve either locked myself out of my apartment or arrived at work and realized I’d left either my wallet or cell phone at home. That is, until someone very close to me taught me to say, “wallet, keys, cell phone, Metrocard” before walking out the door. Little did he know he was using a very powerful tool, the checklist.
As part of my money-saving strategies this year, I’ve resorted to using the New York Public Library to support my reading habit, instead of going to the various megabookstores in my neighborhood (I always fall for the “buy-two-get-one-free” deal!). That’s why I’m late to the party for The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. After three months on hold, my turn finally came up—and boy was it worth the wait. There are so many great anecdotes about success stories (and some failures) of checklists—including patients surviving accidents and surgeries against all odds, averted airplane crashes, and well-orchestrated rock concerts—that it makes me want to start implementing checklists in every aspect of my life (including some at AJN). In fact, if I’d had a checklist for packing my bag for this weekend, I’d have remembered my flat iron, amongst other necessities. Now I’m forced to go the next 48 hours with serious frizz!
My favorite part of the book, though, is that Gawande gives credit to nurses for being the originators of checklist usage in hospitals, citing vital sign charts, […]
Here’s a few things that got our attention late this week:
Chronic Disease Expert: U.S. Health Care Needs to Treat the ‘Whole Person’: At Kaiser Health News, a Q & A with a Stanford University chronic disease expert (who started her health care career as a registered nurse) focuses on the fragmentation of our health care system. Here’s a sample:
Q. Could the health care system do a better job addressing chronic disease?
A. The system would probably need to be totally reorganized if it was really going to do that. Right now, it addresses diseases or even parts of diseases or small sub-parts of the body. It does not address the whole, complex person with multiple chronic diseases. So, right now, what happens, if you’re lucky, you go to a primary care doc who kind of does the day-to-day stuff and then you see four or five specialists each of which do their little specialty part — none of whom really talk to each other except maybe to look at your laboratory tests on an electronic medical record if you’re really lucky.
It is totally uncoordinated. It’s chaotic. It serves pieces of people, not whole people.
Mental Health Impact of BP Spill Multiplies: Feel depressed and hopeless about the Gulf Oil Spill? At Covering Health, an article sketches out some of the journalistic work being done to look at what some people have actually begun calling “Gulf Oil Syndrome.”
Speaking of the oil spill, Sean Dent, a nurse who blogs at My Strong Medicine, has a recent post called
With James River Hospital facing possible shutdown because of its below average patient care, Hawthorne is expected to improve the quality of care of the hospital in just three months.
Wrapping up the 2010 ANA House of Delegates
By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief. See Shawn’s other blog posts from the ANA House of Delegates meeting here and here.
The ANA House of Delegates, the governing body of the American Nurses Association, ended its 2010 meeting on Saturday, June 21, saying goodbye to outgoing president Becky Patton and welcoming new president Karen Daley, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, from Massachusetts.
Daley, who’s held various state and national offices, is probably best known for her advocacy and leadership in working to pass federal legislation for safer needles and needlestick injury prevention programs. The next day, the first full day of her presidency, she made a trip to the White House (not her first visit—she was there in 2000 when President Bill Clinton signed the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act). (See the ANA press release with the full list of newly elected officers; other House of Delegate actions are listed here.)
This year, the atmosphere was markedly different from past years—no angry delegates walked out; no groups plotted disruptive strategies; there was even little word-smithing of resolutions. Everyone seemed to be working together. Maybe the cooperative atmosphere came about because there were no really controversial issues relating to organizational structure or dues or bylaws (perhaps the most controversial was whether to change terms of office from two years to four—it didn’t pass); or because the President of the United States […]