August Issue Highlights: Experiencing Racism in Nursing, Promoting Publications by Nurses, Much More

“Six of the nurses quit when they found out I was coming on because they said they would not take orders from me . . .”nursing leader Bernardine Lacey on encountering racism in her career, as described in this month’s Historical Feature

The August issue of AJN is now live. Here are some highlights.

Original Research: Understanding Nursing Home Staff Attitudes Toward Death and Dying: A Survey

In this multisite study, the authors surveyed nursing home staff to gain insight into their perspectives on end-of-life care and to identify needs in such areas as pain control and palliative care education and training.

PANDAS: Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infection

A review of the pathogenesis, clinical presentation, diagnosis, and treatment of pediatric neuropsychiatric disorders associated with strep infection, plus teaching points for parents and patients.

Historical Feature: ‘You Don’t Have Any Business Being This Good’: An Oral History Interview with Bernardine Lacey

This article details, in her own words, black nursing leader Bernardine Lacey’s experiences with racism in her childhood, education, and career.

[…]

2020-07-29T09:27:02-04:00July 29th, 2020|Nursing|0 Comments

Recent End-of-Life Care Links of Note, by Nurses and Others

nature's own tightrope/marie and alistair knock/flickr creative commons nature’s own tightrope/marie and alistair knock/flickr creative commons

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

End-of-life care and decision making have been getting a lot of attention lately. The Institute of Medicine released a new report earlier this year, Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life (available for free download as a PDF).

Nurses who write often write about end-of-life matters. A couple of recent examples:

On the Nurse Manifest Web site, a look at the realities and challenges of futile care in America. Here’s a quote:

“I am currently teaching a thanatology (study of death and dying) course for nurses that I designed . . . to support students to go deeply in their reflective process around death and dying, to explore the holistic needs of the dying, and to delve into the body of evidence around the science and politics of death and dying.”

Or read another nurse blogger’s less abstract take on the tricky emotional territory nurses face when a patient dies.

Elsewhere on the Web
Vox reporter Sarah Kliff collects five strong end-of-life essays that recently appeared in various sources.

And here’s something very practical that might catch on: according to a recent […]

Angelina, Florence, End-of-Life Care, Nursing History, Postpartum Depression: A Web Roundup

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

In the news today we have an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Angelina Jolie about her rationale for getting a double mastectomy. There are sure to be many reactions to this disclosure, with many offering praise for her frankness about her decision. There may also be some who disagree with her decision to take this preventive step because she has the BRCA1 gene, which sharply increases her risk of getting breast cancer. Jolie’s perspective seems to be one of empowerment for women rather than a sense of helplessness or sorrow. Though Jolie’s circumstances are hardly universal in terms of the cushion provided by her great wealth, it’s hard not to admire the strength it takes to see things in such a positive light: “Life comes with many challenges,” she writes. “The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.”

MarchCoverIt’s come to our attention that, in honor of Nurses Week, the American Antiquarian Society blog, PastIsPresent.org, put together an interesting collection of items related to nursing from its mid-19th century archives, leading their post with a mention of AJN‘s March cover, which featured a vintage illustration, “A Map of the Open Country of  Woman’s Heart.”

A recent post we ran about the fading away of certain nursing blogs gets a mention from PixelRN, who has […]

Year-End Take: A Hopeful Trend in U.S. Health Care?

Less Is Sometimes More
A hopeful trend that’s gained some serious momentum this year—and may be connected to both the recession and some provisions of the Affordable Care Act—is that we’re beginning to question whether we really need quite so many tests and drugs. By ‘we’ I mean researchers, some journalists, some nurses and physicians, and of course patients. The answers aren’t always clear, and there’s plenty of room for disagreement on many such issues, but at least we’re asking the right questions more often, rather than retreating in fear and simply hurling around the word “rationing”:

Who really benefits from prostate and breast cancer screening and who is more likely to be harmed, and why? When are you too young or too old to be likely to benefit from a certain type of screening? When does aggressive care at the end of life cease to make sense? Are we confusing a risk factor with a disease, an association with causation, relative risk with absolute risk?

Does that drug you see relentlessly marketed in advertisements during breaks in the network news actually help you? Which physicians are being paid as consultants in support of various drugs, tests, or treatments, and does this compromise their objectivity? And so on. The latest example of this kind of analysis I’ve stumbled across can be found here: “Disease Creep: How We’re Fooled Into Using More Medicine Than We Need.”

The Many Faces of Nursing
So, that’s […]

Toward a Less Painful Death: ICD Deactivation at End of Life

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

A few years ago, in a letter to the editor of another journal, an NP described how one of her patients, a man on home hospice care, had suffered 33 shocks as he lay dying in his wife’s arms. The source of those shocks, his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), reportedly “got so hot that it burned through his skin.” The device that had been implanted to save his life caused this man and his wife great distress in his final hours. Device deactivation at the end of life is an option; but in this case, apparently, it had never been discussed.

Stories like this one helped to inspire the research reported in this month’s CE feature, “Deactivation of ICDs at the End of Life: A Systematic Review of Clinical Practices and Provider and Patient Attitudes,” by James Russo.

ICDs, standard treatment for people at risk for life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, work to restore normal rhythm by delivering a high-energy, painful electrical shock. The devices are so effective that people with ICDs often die from causes other than heart disease. But once a person with an ICD begins actively dying, as in the case above, the device may cause needless pain and prolonged suffering. […]

2016-11-21T13:11:44-05:00October 14th, 2011|nursing research|0 Comments
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