AJN’s December Issue: Working During a Pandemic, HIV Foot Care, Healing Pet Visits, a Focus on Narrative

AJN1213.Cover.OnlineAJN’s December issue is now available on our Web site, just in time for some holiday reading. Here’s a selection of what not to miss.

Working during a pandemic. Flu season is in swing, but how do nurses feel about working during a flu pandemic? Researchers investigating terrorism and catastrophic events found that up to 96% of health care workers reported being unable or unwilling to work during some emergencies, with some infectious diseases associated with the highest rates of unwillingness. “Predictors of Nurses’ Intentions to Work During the 2009 Influenza A (H1N1) Pandemic,” December’s original research CE, suggests that providing adequate resources during an emergency (such as personal protective equipment) will not only ensure the safety of patients, nurses, and nurses’ families, but may also increase nurses’ willingness to work in times of crisis. 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 of the article. The podcast is also available on our Web site.

HIV foot care. Peripheral neuropathy, which causes debilitating symptoms such as burning pain and sensation loss in the foot, continues to be prevalent in people with HIV, but is often overlooked. “HIV Peripheral Neuropathy and Foot […]

Questions of Priority, Written in Vernix and Blood: Two Poems in ‘Art of Nursing’

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Jenna Kay Rindo’s poem “An Ode to My Certified Nurse Midwife” (Art of Nursing, August) brims with the narrator’s gratitude for the clinician who has seen her through a “gloomy complicated gestation” with great skill and compassion. (Art of Nursing poems are always free online—just click through to the PDF files.)

This is no sentimental paean, though. This ode is a gritty read, full of vernix and “unrehearsed pain,” euphoria and shame. The child, we learn, was “conceived completely out of wedlock, / in a rush of holy illicit love.” The narrator at first only wants to know how long she can hide the pregnancy. It’s the nurse midwife whose “jubilant congratulations” never seem to waver, whose “size seven hands covered in  / sterile latex” draw the infant’s wide shoulders into the world, and give the young mother courage. It’s an ode, perhaps, to something we strive for but rarely attain: a nonjudgmental attitude.

“It is lucky to live outside the target groups,” begins the narrator of Erika Dreifus’s poem “The Autumn of H1N1” (Art of Nursing, October). She is referring to those considered most at risk for the flu and thus at the top of the list for immunization.

But when she finds herself hemorrhaging and frightened, waiting to be seen by a gynecologist who minimizes her distress, she reveals far more complicated feelings about “the prioritized.” It’s an unusually frank […]

2016-11-21T13:15:31-05:00October 1st, 2010|patient engagement|1 Comment

Ignorance May Be Bliss — But It’s Certainly Not Professional

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

A few weeks ago I attended an orientation provided by the New York City Department of Health for a school-based H1N1 vaccination program. Years ago I worked as a school nurse here in New York and I thought participating in the program would be a great way to keep up some clinical skills and spend time with patients. A physician from the bureau of immunization gave an informative lecture reviewing the epidemiology, signs and symptoms, prevention, and treatment of influenza.

There were about 100 nurses in attendance, many of them new graduates who were unable to find full-time work. During a break one of the new grads said to me, “why do we have to sit through this irrelevant lecture?” I couldn’t believe it. If you’re administering a medication, I told her, of course you’d want to understand how it works and why you’re giving it. In addition you need to be able to explain it to the patient or their parent. She rolled her eyes and walked away. And I thought, once again: this is why nurses are not taken seriously as professionals.

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“Pitiable Indeed” – AJN Archives Reveal Nurse’s Firsthand Account of 1918 Flu

1918LetterDoSomething
The above is an excerpt from a North Dakota nurse’s vivid and painful letter to the editor about the Spanish influenza, published in the December 1918 issue of AJN. To read the entire letter, click here (and then click on the PDF link in the upper right corner of the page) or click on the excerpt itself. We’ve combed through our archives for articles dealing with various influenza epidemics and threats of epidemics, and found some fascinating material that puts what we’re currently going through in some perspective. To see the entire collection of articles, covering 1918 to the present, click here. (Note: some articles are free and some are accessible only to AJN subscribers. The older articles are available only in PDF format.)

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Marketers Honing In On Online Nurses

Internet Splat Map (jurvetson/via Flickr)

Nurses, you’re being watched: a marketing Website has an article on the growing influence of nurses online. Let us know what you think. Here’s an excerpt:

. . . Manhattan Research recently released a report about nurses online noting that approximately three out of four U.S. nurses recommend health websites to patients. The study notes that the average nurse spends eight hours per week online for professional purposes, which is just as much time as physicians, and almost all of them use the Internet in between patient consultations. Nurses are also proactive in researching medical product information specifically online – over eighty percent have visited a pharma, biotech, or device company website in the past year.

In addition to the prevalence of the Internet as a research and patient communication tool, nurses are continuing to find their unique voices online through a growing number of prominent nursing blogs such as Codeblog and Emergiblog which both share powerful stories of healthcare from the nurses’ point of view.

Also found today on the Web: […]
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