Archive for the ‘nursing students’ Category

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The Priceless Clarity of Inexperience

September 22, 2011

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Soul on the Head of a Pin,” was published in the May 2010 issue of AJN.

Heartstudy by James P. Wells, via Flickr

I was precepting a senior nursing student last week. During an idle moment, I asked her why she’d decided to go into nursing.

She shrugged, averted her eyes, and mumbled something like “I’ve just always wanted to.”

I didn’t press it, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that. I probably shouldn’t have asked, given that I cringe when posed the same question, and usually give a faltering and inadequate “I like helping people” kind of answer . . . when “that’s too personal of a question” would be more honest.

I’ve been a nurse for years, and there are certain aspects of the profession I wouldn’t attempt to broach in casual conversation. I doubt that I could have articulated my motivations when I was a student, even if I’d wanted to. That exchange, though, calls to mind one of the most defining experiences of my nursing career.

I was a senior nursing student, doing a clinical rotation in the ICU. My preceptor and I were caring for a patient who’d been in a motorcycle accident. He’d not sustained a head injury; he’d worn a helmet. But he’d suffered a high cervical injury, and it was complete. The weight of the helmet, combined with the force of the crash and pathological changes, had caused his neck to snap.  (“Like a stick!” I remember the trauma surgeon saying.) The poor man was wide awake but completely paralyzed.

My recollections of the specific events of that day are clouded by inexperience and shock. I only know that, at some point, a day that had seemed completely normal took a tragic turn. I remember standing by the patient’s bedside, helplessly, as his heart rate suddenly and inexplicably dropped and the trauma surgeon and code cart magically appeared at his bedside.

I remember it becoming incredibly busy and frenzied. In an effort to stay out of the way, I stationed myself at the head of the poor man’s bed.  I laid my hand on his forehead, mumbling futile platitudes as he gazed up at me with fear in his eyes, mouthing words that I never grasped for what felt like an incredibly long time, until he lost consciousness.

I remember his final moments in crystal detail. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in nursing students, professional identity | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments »

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AJN’s Top 10 Blog Posts for the Last Quarter

August 2, 2011

At this blog we’re not always devoted practitioners of the art of the list. Used too often and too cynically (some of the more mysterious nursing blogs consist entirely of lists of articles and excerpts from other blogs), lists can be just another form of journalistic cannibalism.

But it sometimes occurs to me, as I publish a new post that takes its place at the top of the home page and pushes all those below down another notch (until, after a few such nudges, they gradually fall off the page, entering the purgatory of the blog archives), that this isn’t entirely fair.

While blogs allow for quick reaction to a news story, a public health emergency or controversy, a new bit of published research, they are also places for writing that isn’t so narrowly tied to a specific date and event. Many thoughtful posts by excellent writers have been published here in the past couple of years. With this in mind, here’s a list of the 10 most read blog posts for the past 90 days. It doesn’t mean that these are necessarily the very best posts we published in that time, or that they were even published in the last 90 days . . . but it’s one way of measuring relevance.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor 

1. Dispatches from the Alabama Tornado Zone
This one is actually a page with links to a series of powerful and thought-provoking posts by Susan Hassmiller, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, who volunteered with the Red Cross after the devastating Alabama tornadoes in late April of this year.

2. Notes of a Student Nurse: A Dose of Reality
This honest account of a first semester of nursing school is by Jennifer-Clare Williams, a student at Cox College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Springfield, Missouri. We hope to have more of her posts in the future.

3. Bullying Wars: Theresa Brown vs. ‘the entire physician profession’
AJN‘s editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy comes to the defense of nurse and author Theresa Brown, who dared to write about physicians who bully nurses.

4. New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospital Settings – So What Else is New?
We ran this one two years ago, but it’s as relevant as ever for nurses who’ve just graduated from school and are starting out in a new job—and for the nurses who work with them.

5. Don’t Cling to Tradition: A Nursing Student’s Call for Realism, Respect
By Medora McGinnis, a student at Bon Secours Memorial College of Nursing in Richmond, Virginia, this post got a lot of attention with its assertion that “nontraditional” nursing students may be the new normal.

6. What Is Meaningful Use? One Savvy Nurse’s Take
By Jared Sinclair, an ICU nurse in Nashville who has a blog about health care and technology, this post demystifies for nurses some of the issues associated with electronic health records.

7. Workplace Violence Against Nurses — Neither Inevitable Nor Acceptable
A look at some helpful articles that have addressed aspects of this perennially troubling issue. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in health information technology (HIT), nursing perspective, nursing students, public health nursing, social media | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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Don’t Cling to Tradition: A Nursing Student’s Call for Realism, Respect

July 26, 2011

By Medora McGinnis. Medora is a student at Bon Secours Memorial College of Nursing in Richmond, Virginia, and the 2011-2012 Imprint Editor of the National Student Nurses’ Association (NSNA). This is her first post for this blog. 

There was a time when the majority of all nursing programs were diploma programs, emphasizing practice over theory. They were largely based out of hospitals and proved very well suited for this training. Popular among students, they provided the majority of the nursing workforce well into the 1950s. But these programs began to lose popularity as they were supplanted by other forms of training. At the same time, patient care was shifting and hospital care costs were exploding. By the late 1970s, 40 diploma programs were closing their doors every year.

The year is now 2011, and there are less than 40 diploma programs nationwide. I am a senior nursing student in one of these programs, and have been a part of their transition from the diploma to the four-year BSN. My graduating class will be the last of the diploma graduates, and many of us plan to continue our education and quickly complete an RN-to-BSN program. Why? Certainly to maintain our momentum, and to be competitive in today’s workforce. But the undertone in the nursing community, especially among young and new nurses, is that the BSN is required in order to earn respect. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in continuing education, nursing students, professional identity | Tagged , , , | 19 Comments »

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Drunk on Water, Drug Shortages, Understanding Health Care News, Plus Nursing Blog Posts of Note

July 15, 2011

by LeeBrimelow/via Flickr

The water myth: A physician, writing in the British Medical Journal (abstract only), has looked at the evidence for drinking eight glasses of water a day and says the oft-recommended practice is “debunked nonsense,” a myth the bottled water companies have been only too happy to exploit and that many respected health care organizations and experts continue to support. Maybe common sense reasoning is also partly to blame—after all, the idea seems to make sense. And all that water certainly conjures images of purification, which is inevitably appealing in a world of pervasive toxins, chemicals, food additives, and the like, and in a time when fewer people in any given Western country practice the same or similar religious sacraments or rituals, practices that may—among other functions—have once served a similar “purifying” psychologic purpose.

Drug shortages: The Wall Street Journal Health Blog has reported on two surveys that suggest that “unprecedented” drug shortages are being experienced by most hospitals. The reasons are multiple: shortage rumors that prompt hoarding, FDA actions that halt production, lack of a crucial ingredient, poor inventory management, and others:

All treatment categories were affected, hospitals said, with 80% or more respondents experiencing shortages of surgery/anesthesia, emergency care, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal/nutrition, pain or infectious disease drugs. And 66% of hospitals reported shortages of cancer drugs. Some 47% of hospitals reported experiencing a shortage of at least one drug on a daily basis.

What the study really said: The following resource isn’t new, but with more and more people getting health care news from the Internet, network television, newspapers, or from TV personalities like Oprah and Dr. Oz, it’s more important than ever for us all, whether health care journalists or nurses, to know a bit more about judging the quality of the evidence out there for certain treatments, tests, and drugs. HealthNewsReview.org offers some excellent tools for understanding what’s true, possibly true, and a complete distortion of the facts, with short primers on everything from causation vs. association, absolute vs. relative risk, and phases of drug studies to commercialism and much more.

Nursing blog sampler: Emergiblog had a nice post about a week ago about the practical challenges involved in treating the increasing numbers of children whose parents are unable to control them (or, as she puts it, “kids seem to be the adults in some families”). For something on the light side, Nurse Ratched’s Place has a post called “Treadmills, Hot Guys, and Nurses.” The gist is that everyone needs a little motivation, whether in the gym or while working a long nursing shift, and maybe a little old-fashioned objectification is just the thing (but not, of course, underwritten or endorsed by AJN!). Notes of a Nurse-To-Be has a post (ok, a couple weeks old now) on the particular kind of mental fatigue she experienced during her first mental health rotation. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in children's health, nursing students, writing and nursing | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments »

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The Sacraments of Nursing

May 26, 2011

At the center of Sister Thecla’s demonstrations was an old manikin that lived all its days on the hospital bed at the front of the classroom. I can still see its chipped, painted face—the trust in the eyes, the unreadable thin lips. I can see Sister Thecla turning that manikin on its side, taking care so the blanket wouldn’t slip and expose any imagined privates. And Sister Thecla’s hands—how they were all tenderness, and how somehow, right before our eyes, they transubstantiated the cotton backside of that manikin into the feverish, aching flesh of a real sick person.

Every month, as you may know, we publish a personal essay inside our back cover. This month, our Reflections essay is by Madeleine Mysko, the coordinator of that monthly column. Madeleine, a novelist and poet who teaches writing in the Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Programs, is also a nurse. She helps us find potential writers and reviews most Reflections submissions. I edit all accepted submissions before publication, but I sometimes call on Madeleine for another point of view, especially if I’m stuck or if I sense I’m missing something crucial. She invariably has suggestions that make the essay flow more elegantly and cleanly—and strike home more powerfully.

The excerpt above is from her piece in the May edition of AJN. “The Sacraments of Sister Thecla” (for best reading, click through to the PDF version) describes a kind of mystical visitation from a teacher Madeleine had back in nursing school in the 1960s. Clearly, teachers do make a difference.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

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Posted in nursing students, professional identity, spirituality and nursing, writing and nursing | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

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Meeting Nightingale in Alabama; Where Were the Young Nurses? Further Notes from the Disaster Zone

May 13, 2011

Sue Hassmiller has been blogging from the tornado-damaged area in Alabama, where she’s volunteering for the Red Cross. This and all other posts in this series are collected on a separate page for easy reference.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

Finishing up some very difficult hospital visits with victims and family members at the University of Alabama–Birmingham Medical Center today, I saw the sign for the school of nursing. I remembered Dean Dodi Harper telling me last year of a man who had donated to her school what might be the largest grouping of original Florence Nightingale letters. A priceless gift indeed! Her intent was to transcribe the letters and eventually have an exhibit. As I saw the School of Nursing sign, the conversation all came back to me . . . and then I realized it was May 12, Nightingale’s actual birthday, the day we celebrate Nurses Day! Too good to be true: I e-mailed the dean and got an immediate response (I love those type A personalities!). She was away, but the assistant dean for clinical affairs and partnerships, Cindy Selleck, would welcome me—and indeed on this occasion the letters were on display in a temporary exhibit. Having been on a special Nightingale tour last year to England and Istanbul/Scutari, the words of this great mentor had taken on a whole new meaning for me (here’s the blog series I wrote at the time). 

Seeing this very special exhibit and Nightingale’s words on her very own stationery made me realize once again why I had come to Alabama. Between the families that we helped that day and Nightingale’s words of inspiration, this is a Nurses Day I will never forget. Happy Nurses Day all! It was a great one for me!            

Where were you, my young colleagues? Looking around at who served in this disaster gave me a stark reminder of the great need to replenish our ranks. Most nurses were my age and older, a well-experienced corps to be sure, but this just won’t do for the future!! Students ask for advice all the time about how to go about finding a job when there are few jobs currently to be had. And this is what I tell them: 

Red Cross Student Nurse Guidelines

1). Take any job that is available and move on from there.

2). If possible, take this time to continue your education. Getting the vast majority of nurses (80%) to the BSN level by 2020 is a big goal of our Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action.

3). VOLUNTEER. Doing volunteer work can help you get a broad base of experience you could not otherwise get. That’s how I started my career. It was always the Red Cross, but it was also free care medical clinics, children’s medical services, and several years as a camp nurse for diabetic children. I realize that there are rent and student loans to repay, but doing something to expand your resume for even two hours a weeks will benefit you immensely. For more information on the Red Cross go to this page and this page. Your professional associations, like the American Nurses Association, and especially the National Student Nurses Association while you are still in school, are also good places to connect.

The next time I volunteer to serve in a disaster, I want to see you there! Please!

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Posted in nursing students, professional identity, public health nursing, writing and nursing | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

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Notes of a Student Nurse: A Dose of Reality

May 4, 2011

By Jennifer-Clare Williams, who is a student at Cox College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Springfield, Missouri. This is her first post for this blog.

Doyle Alphabet by fdecomite, via Flickr

It’s been said before that we are our own worst enemies, our own worst critics. I can’t imagine a time when these phrases are truer than during nursing school. Little more than a year ago, when I was starting my prerequisites for admission to the BSN nursing program, I was giddy with excitement. Images of what life would be like played in my head like episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, or, on a day I was feeling a bit more goofy, reruns of Scrubs.

I took any opportunity I had to share with friends, family—even new apartment neighbors—that I was well on my way to nursing school with the confident smile of a person destined to save the world, one patient at a time. I scoured discussion boards and nursing student forums late into the night, anticipating the day that I, too, would have something profound to contribute.

I laughed off those who warned me that the path was difficult and ridden with challenges. There was no bridge I couldn’t cross, no task I couldn’t do, and no test I couldn’t pass with flying colors. The world was mine. Now, I’m living those moments as a first semester nursing student—but a funny thing happened on the way to the present, a thing I will lovingly refer to as reality.

And reality has an uncanny way of making sure you’re well aware of his presence. The truth is, most days I feel more like the character Steve Urkel in Family Matters than like Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy—awkward, unsure, and out of my element. My excitement masquerades more as fear. And those scrubs? Hardly the superhero cape I’d imagined. Yes, the truth is, for the first time in my life, I don’t have the definitive answers to anything, my “natural aptitude” for test taking continually disappoints me, and that confident, poised, straight-A student has somehow disappeared, leaving a nervous, uncomfortable rookie in her place.

I replay my mistakes (“No wonder your patient was uncomfortable—you put the bedpan under her backwards!”), I cry more than I ever have in my life, and I continuously wonder how on earth I will ever learn everything I need to know.

But there is good news. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in nursing students, professional identity, writing and nursing | Tagged , , , , , | 18 Comments »

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Nurses, Summits, and Salt Lake: The Challenges Facing New Nursing Grads

April 7, 2011

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

I’m attending the National Student Nurses’ Association (NSNA) annual convention, in Salt Lake City, Utah. I always gripe about meetings here—but then I arrive and realize I’d forgotten what a beautiful place it is. For one thing, there are the mountains rising up behind the cityscape—everywhere you look, there they are. (The photo here was taken from the plane as it was approaching Salt Lake City.)  There’s something really relaxing about these views.

I always enjoy this conference—I love meeting the future generation of nurses. This year’s group—about 2,400 strong—are enthusiastic, passionate, and serious about a career, not just a job. Many are people who’ve already been in the workforce. According to figures from the NSNA about the attendees, 47% are 26 or older, 22% are 36 or older, 52% will be graduating from baccalaureate programs, and 93% plan to continue their education. Impressive statistics.

Yesterday’s keynote speaker was Patrick Hickey, a professor at University of South Carolina–Columbia School of Nursing, who has summited the seven highest peaks in the world. He spoke about the challenges of his climbs, especially Mount Everest, where he spread the ashes of a friend who was supposed to have been with him. It was fitting—here, with mountains all around us, and with many in the audience facing their own uphill climb to find a job (for one new nurse’s advice on what not to say to a recent graduate in search of a job, read the April Viewpoint column in AJN, “I Answered the Call—Now Please Give Me a Job”).

Many of the students I spoke with who are graduating in May are finding it difficult to even get an interview. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in nursing students, Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments »

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Nursing and Women’s Basketball Go Back a Long Way

April 5, 2011
Nursing Student Basketball Team, Grace Hospital, Detroit, 1924

By Maureen ‘Shawn’ Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

I’m a big college basketball fan (to me, professional teams seem less about the team and more about the players). When I was growing up in the city, playground basketball was the only sport that was accessible on a daily basis. (OK, there was a ping-pong table, but that just didn’t seem as exciting.) I learned to play the game there, and then played in high school and for one year in college as a freshman. After that, nursing classes and a part-time job interfered. More recently, I coached grammar school and middle school girls teams (one of the funnest things I’ve done!).

I love that the women’s NCAA college basketball tournament has received more and more coverage each year. A few years ago, one was hard-pressed to find out when the games were being televised. Now, they’re enjoying prime time, if not a prime channel. (Women’s games—and tonight’s championship game between Notre Dame and Texas A&M—are usually broadcast on cable, on ESPN.)

So here’s some trivia: many people may not know that most nursing schools had basketball teams in their early days—as far back as the 1920s. It’s always been interesting to me that, despite the oppressive and convent-like restrictions placed on nursing students, these young women could play basketball! There were leagues among schools—the AJN archives has articles and photos of early teams (the photo above shows the team at Grace Hospital in Detroit, in 1924; click through to the PDF version of the article to read an excerpt). Many schools maintained teams into the 1970s. I doubt that any continue today, since so many diploma schools of nursing have closed.

So, I wonder if any of the players who reached the “Final Four” are nursing students—does anyone know?

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Posted in from the archives, nursing students, Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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Vampire Nurses, PhDs, Your Best Moment as a Nurse: Today’s Notes from the Nursosphere

March 30, 2011

Here are some recent posts of interest we noticed on the nursing blogs. Many of these blogs can actually be found on our blogroll, so we hope you’re exploring what’s there from time to time, even if we know the list isn’t exhaustive and is probably missing some other excellent (and at least somewhat frequently updated) blogs.

It’s good to know that Will, the nurse/comic artist who shares his drawings at Drawing on Experience, has started posting again more regularly. One of his most recent efforts depicts a night shift nurse as a kind of vampire. It’s funny and, in a way, insightful. We give just a thumbnail version of it below on the right, in the interests of preserving the artist’s copyright; to see it enlarged, click the image and visit the version posted on his site, where you can also find a bunch more drawings, many about his life as a relatively new nurse. 

The INQRI Blog (that INQRI stands for Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, a real mouthful) has a new post about an increase in enrollment in nursing doctorate programs. Here’s an excerpt:

According to new data released recently by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), enrollment in doctoral nursing programs increased significantly in 2010. The AACN believes that this shows a strong interest in both research-focused and practice-focused doctorates.

The post also connects this enrollment trend with some recommendations from the IOM Future of Nursing Report, which we’ve written about more than once on this blog in recent months. But no more policy today! Whatever your degree, if you’re a nurse, you probably wonder from time to time why you do such a challenging job. An evocative post at Those Emergency Blues recounts an after-dinner conversation between two friends about just this. One of them asks the other, “What’s your best moment in nursing?” The author struggles to find an answer. Here’s part of what she says:

I stopped and thought. I could see my reflection in the dining room mirror, dimly, and even I could see bone-tired in my face. But I thought about codes and trauma. I thought about why I was once made Employee of the Month. I thought of smaller moments of giving care— warm blankets, a back rub, a cup of ice chips, repositioning. I thought about missed findings. I thought about the time a patient an ambulance gurney went VSA while I was triaging her, and walked out of hospital ten days later. I thought about innumerable STEMIs caught and thrombolysed (and later sent for rescue cathetherization) within minutes of arrival. I thought about the times when I pushed for some extra intervention which made a real difference in the patient’s life.

It’s engaging, but it’s probably not the most important part of her answer, which you’ll have to read the entire post to learn. Anyway, maybe we’ll steal the question and ask it here, since we’d really like to know what our readers think (as the chill air hangs on at the end of March and energy levels waver). So what’s your best moment as a nurse?—JM, senior editor/blog editor

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Posted in art and nursing, continuing education, nursing students, professional identity, writing and nursing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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