Built for This: One NP’s Revitalized Practice

March 30, 2020, was the first day working at this clinic; it was the same day I was supposed to be returning from my honeymoon in Panama.

That’s from our May Reflections essay, “Built for This,” which is free for the rest of May (along with the entire issue, in honor of Nurses Month). Written by Janey Kottler, a family nurse practitioner and clinical instructor, the essay is about volunteering at a clinic on Chicago’s West Side, which was hard-hit by Covid-19. There she encountered families placed under impossible pressure and risk by the need to keep their jobs during the pandemic.

I think about the single mother and her two children I treated recently. The mother is an essential worker at a grocery store and utilizes her neighbor for childcare during work hours. The family’s neighbors are elderly: the wife stays at home while her husband is an essential worker, working on a factory line. They were grateful to have an income throughout the pandemic until her husband fell ill after COVID exposure at work. He has now inadvertently exposed his wife and the children she babysits.

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The Primary Care Confessions of Traumatized Patients

drawing of patient in waiting room Illustration by Hana Cisarova. All rights reserved.

In this month’s Reflections essay, “The Traumatized Patient,” family nurse practitioner Margaret Adams delves with sympathy into what she calls the “primary care confessions” of a challenging subset of patients. Writes Adams:

I’ve come to recognize patients like you—sometimes by your disturbingly long and detailed allergy lists, but more often by the frequency with which you come in for the same constellation of symptoms: fatigue, headaches, dizziness, general malaise. Something happened to you— maybe years ago, maybe recently—and it left its mark on you in irredeemable ways, . . .

While symptoms often do have underlying physiological causes, Adams is likewise attuned to the emotional subtext behind certain seemingly fruitless patient encounters. And with many specific examples, she makes the case here that the life of trauma plays itself out over time in the body and mind. […]

AJN’s January Issue: Perceptions of Employment-Based Discrimination Among FENs, Self-Management of Incontinence, Book of the Year Awards, More

AJNJANAJN’s January issue is now available on our Web site. Here’s a selection of what not to miss, including two continuing education (CE) articles, which you can access for free.

Experts say that nursing shortages could reappear as soon as 2015. Historically, foreign-educated nurses (FENs) have been essential in filling those spaces. This month’s original research article, “Perceptions of Employment-Based Discrimination Among Newly Arrived Foreign-Educated Nurses,” surveyed FENs to determine whether they perceived they were being treated equitably in the U.S. workplace.

Earn 2.5 CE credits by reading this article and taking the test that follows. If you’re reading AJN on your iPad, you can listen to a podcast interview with the author by clicking on the podcast icon on the first page. The podcast is also available on our Web site.

Incontinence can have many distressing physical and social outcomes, and many sufferers try to deal with the condition on their own. “Self-Management of Urinary and Fecal Incontinence” provides nurses with strategies that can be incorporated within the framework of self-management to control urinary, fecal, or dual incontinence. Earn 2.3 CE credits by reading this article and taking the test that follows.

Violence is a recognized public health problem in the Unites States, and the media’s focus on recent tragic stories has likely reinforced the common perception that mental illness causes violence. “Mental Health and Violence,” an article in our Mental Health Matters column, reviews the relevant research and describes how all […]

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