Family Caregivers: Nurses by Default

Caregiver guides family member using safe stair-climbing technique. Photo courtesy of AARP Public Policy Institute.

We all know how compressed hospital stays are. Patients are frequently admitted and discharged within a few days, even for what used to be “big” surgeries. We dutifully send them home with discharge instructions—sometimes, pages of them—and often have only a few minutes to go over them with whoever is taking the patient home. And in many cases, that person is not even the one who will be caring for the patient, so instructions for medications and treatments are given second-hand. And we wonder why there are so many readmissions within 30 days!

Forty million plus unpaid caregivers in the United States.

As I note in this month’s editorial, there are over 40 million unpaid caregivers in this country who are administering complex medical and nursing interventions such as ostomy and wound care,  tube feedings, injections, and tracheostomy care, in addition to taking on bathing, toileting, and other necessary care. Many of these caregivers do so without any real training. Aside from the real danger […]

2017-12-04T12:34:59-05:00December 4th, 2017|family caregiving, Nursing|0 Comments
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The Huddle: A New Mother’s Experience of Discharge Planning

By Amy M. Collins, AJN managing editor

John Martinez Pavliga/Flickr Creative Commons By John Martinez Pavliga/Flickr Creative Commons

Three months ago, I gave birth to my first child under somewhat traumatic circumstances. After a fast and furious labor onset, I was all set to be given an epidural when I was informed the baby’s heart rate had dropped dramatically and I needed to have an emergency C-section. Thankfully, everything turned out okay, and my son was born healthy.

Nurses changed shifts every 12 hours during my four-day hospital stay, and each of them provided excellent care. They spent massive amounts of time with me, helping me to get up and walk around, showing me how to expertly swaddle my baby like a burrito, and even helping me get the hang of feeding my child.

On my last day, two nurses were assigned to get me ready for my discharge. They had tons of printed information for me on postnatal care, wound care, postpartum depression, etc. I was told by one of the nurses that we were going to now have a “mother–child huddle.” She then said to the other nurse, with what I took to be a little irony in her tone, “Are you ready for the mother–child huddle?” Curious, I asked why the emphasis on the word.

“I just think the word ‘huddle’ is silly,” she said, […]

2016-11-21T13:02:18-05:00July 10th, 2015|Nursing, patient engagement, patient experience, Patients|3 Comments
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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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