Strong Nurse and Patient Voices On the Blogs This Week

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

Photo by mezone, via Flickr. Photo by mezone, via Flickr.

Here’s a short Friday list of recent smart, honest, informative blog posts by nurses, as well as a couple of interesting patient perspectives on prominent types of chronic illness and the ways they are talked about by the rest of us.

At Head Nurse, in “Yes…No. I’m Having Some Thoughts About BSNs,” an ADN-prepared nurse makes some familiar and some more surprising observations about the effects of the new policy of hiring mostly BSN-prepared nurses at her facility as it tries for Magnet status. For example, one of the effects she notes is “a massive drop-off in terms of the diversity of our nursing staff.” The move toward BSNs is obviously the trend in nursing, and is supported by research, but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t still two sides to the issue, or real unintended consequences to address as this change is gradually implemented.

At Hospice Diary, the blog of hospice nurse Amy Getter, there’s a post called “Hearts, Flowers, and Bucket Lists.” Reflecting on the imminent death of a patient, the author puts the popular notion of bucket lists into perspective:

“I think about some of the things I would still […]

2016-11-21T13:02:58-05:00February 20th, 2015|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Don’t Write Off Community College to Start a Nursing Career

By Karen Roush, MSN, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

KarenRoushMy daughter is about to start her nursing career. She’s got all her prereqs out of the way and she’s waiting to hear from the half-dozen colleges she applied to. Among them is the community college where I started my career 35 years ago. That’s right—a community college that confers an associate degree.

I hope she gets in.

Community colleges are seen by many as the bottom of the ladder of desired schools of nursing. Not only do they offer only a two-year degree, but they’re not seen as being as selective as four-year colleges and they don’t have the big name professors.

But community colleges can and do produce great nurses. Programs are rigorous, so a more liberal admission standard at the onset doesn’t necessarily change the caliber of student who graduates at the end. And once they graduate, they must meet the same standards as students from four-year schools to attain licensure as an RN—everyone takes the same NCLEX. At the time of my graduation, my school had a 98% pass rate, one of the highest in the country.

Community colleges even have some advantages over a lot of four-year programs. They may not have the big names—but really, how many of those big name […]

2016-11-21T13:05:07-05:00March 26th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, students|12 Comments
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Don’t Cling to Tradition: A Nursing Student’s Call for Realism, Respect

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 […]

2016-11-21T13:12:22-05:00July 26th, 2011|career, students|17 Comments
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Notes of a Student Nurse: A Dose of Reality

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.

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 […]

2016-11-21T13:13:19-05:00May 4th, 2011|career, students|19 Comments
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Vampire Nurses, PhDs, Your Best Moment as a Nurse: Today’s Notes from the Nursosphere

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 […]

2016-11-21T13:13:39-05:00March 30th, 2011|career, students|1 Comment
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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