July Issue: Implicit Bias in Nursing, Grief Support for Hospital Staff, Understanding Malpractice, More

“Get to know patients’ former selves. Ask different questions. Discover their answers. I am so glad I did.” —Jennifer Chicca, author of the July Reflections column, “What Joanna Would Have Wanted”

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

CE: Original Research: Helping Health Care Providers and Staff Process Grief Through a Hospital-Based Program

This study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of offering an intensive bereavement support program—aimed at addressing grief and loss related to both professional and personal experiences—to hospital employees in a large health system.

CE: Addressing Implicit Bias in Nursing: A Review

This article describes the ways that implicit, or unconscious, bias among health care providers can contribute to health care disparities, and offers strategies nurses can use to discover and overcome their own implicit biases.

Special Feature: Rising to the Challenge: Re-Embracing the Wald Model of Nursing

The author discusses how Lillian Wald’s model of health care, in which nurses work at the intersection of medicine and society, may be useful today as nurses seek to address diseases of despair and improve health equity.

Transition to Practice: Surviving Your First Code

This article prepares new nurses for their first code, describes what happens during a code, and reviews the responsibilities of the resuscitation team.

2019-06-24T10:12:42-04:00June 24th, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments
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The Lasting Influence of the Progressive Visiting Nurses of the Late 19th Century

Nursing has a long history of advocacy and activism on behalf of vulnerable populations. For Women’s History Month, we have been drawing attention to the theme of the intimate connection between nursing history and women’s history. In this post, we share an image of nurses at the Henry Street Settlement in New York’s Lower East Side in the late 19th century, where nurse and social worker Lillian Wald organized nurses to bring essential health services and much more to the poor immigrant populations of the area.

A new model of possibility.

These early visiting nurses established a new model of possibility that has echoed through efforts since to improve the health and living conditions of millions. The following text, from the editorial comment in the January 1902 issue of the American Journal of Nursing, suggests that the efforts of these progressive nurses in the Lower East Side threw into relief some of the forces of corruption in New York City’s famed and powerful political machine that were keeping the poor in such abysmal and unhealthy living and working conditions.

Henry Street Settlement Nurse, Lower East Side, New York City

“After the downfall of Tammany, the […]

2019-03-15T11:07:58-04:00March 15th, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments
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Do Schools Still Have Nurses?

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor

by woodley wonderworks, via Flickr. by woodley wonderworks, via Flickr.

In the December 1903 issue of AJN (reprinted, with an editor’s commentary, in September 2014), Henry Street Settlement nurse Lina L. Rogers described the impact of the first school nurse program in the United States. Ms. Rogers, who worked with Henry Street founder Lillian Wald to establish the program in New York City schools, emphasized that their purpose was not only to improve children’s health but to decrease missed school days.

Wise community leaders have long acknowledged the importance of school nursing in accomplishing these goals. But in recent years, this hasn’t prevented cutbacks that eliminate or severely limit the care that nurses can provide to their school communities.

An  October 10 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer describes an acute shortage of nurses in Philadelphia schools. Detailed here are multi-school coverage by individual RNs, wildly unrealistic caseloads for many of the nurses, and the significant responsibilities for “medical care” now borne by non-nurse teachers and administrators. In the article, Terry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, underscores the complexities of school nurse work, noting, “We have so many families living in deep poverty, and for some of these families, the […]

2016-11-21T13:01:51-05:00October 16th, 2015|Nursing|4 Comments
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Women’s History Month: Nurses Started What?

Lillian Wald and other notable nurse pioneers, 1923The first paragraph of Maureen Shawn Kennedy’s editorial in the March issue of AJN, “Securing Our Place in History,” ends with a thought-provoking suggestion:

In 1980, after realizing that women were largely missing from the history books, a group of women formed the National Women’s History Project . . . and, in 1987, were successful in getting Congress to designate the month of March as Women’s History Month. . . .This year’s theme, “Weaving the Stories of Women’s Lives,” reflects the . . . tenet that “ [k]nowing women’s achievements challenges stereotypes and upends social assumptions about who women are and what women can accomplish today.” One might substitute the word nurses for women in this statement.

Public health nursing, school nurses, hospice, and many other crucial areas of health care today began with the efforts of nurses. Noting the many accomplishments of Lillian Wald, Lavinia Dock, Annie Goodrich, M. Adelaide Nutting, and the other nurses in the 1923 group photo on our March cover, shown as they gathered to celebrate the opening of the new headquarters of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service, Kennedy urges nurses today to learn about this tradition and to envision how they can carry it forward:

“The story of […]

2016-11-21T13:02:53-05:00March 11th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Nurse ‘Edge Runners’ from the AJN Archives

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

In her message to nurses for Nurses Week, ANA president Karen Daley notes, “This year’s National Nurses Week theme, ‘Delivering Quality and Innovation in Patient Care,’ emphasizes our role and influence in making the health care system work better for patients. Think about the many ways you innovate and improve care.”

The Frontier Nursing Service evolved from the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies initiated by Mary Breckenridge in 1925. The Frontier Nursing Service evolved from the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies initiated by Mary Breckenridge in 1925.

We’ve been publishing our series on “Edge Runners”—those nurses designated by the American Academy of Nursing (AAN) as creative, out-of-the box innovators. In January, we profiled Marilyn Rantz for her innovative program to assist seniors to age in place; in March, we highlighted Deborah Gross for her Chicago Parent Program; for May, we have a profile of Donna Torrisi, founder of a nurse-managed family health center in Philadelpia. (The AJN articles linked to in this post will be free for the next week, until May 13, in honor of Nurses Week.)

But of course, there were ‘edge runners’ well before the AAN starting naming them. Nurses have a time-worn tradition of using their creativity and problem solving to provide care to those who need it, and AJN has chronicled many of these movers and shakers over the years.

Here’s a couple of my favorites from AJN’s archives (click […]

2016-11-21T13:07:39-05:00May 7th, 2013|Nursing|0 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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