AJN in February: Rapid Response Teams, Complications of CHD Repair, Managing Type 2 Diabetes, More

AJN0215 Cover OnlineAJN’s February issue is now available on our Web site. Here’s a selection of what not to miss.

Rapid response teams (RRTs) are teams of expert providers who can be called on in an emergency to treat patients before their condition deteriorates. The success of an RRT depends on whether it is activated properly, a task that often falls to staff nurses. The original research article, “Hospital System Barriers to Rapid Response Team Activation: A Cognitive Work Analysis,” describes the factors affecting nurses’ decisions to activate RRTs. This CE feature offers 3 CE credits to those who take the test that follows the article.

Further explore this topic by listening to a podcast interview with the author (this and other free podcasts are accessible via the Behind the Article podcasts page on our Web site, in our iPad app, or on iTunes).

Long-term complications after congenital heart defect (CHD) repair. Nurses often encounter patients with complications that occurred years after CHD repair. “Long-Term Outcomes After Repair of Congenital Heart Disease: Part 2” reviews four common CHDs, their repairs, common long-term outcomes, and implications for nurses in both cardiac and noncardiac settings. This article offers 2.5 CE credits to those who take the test that follows the article.

Making nurses full partners in reforming health care. The Institute of Medicine’s […]

iPad Apps, the Future of Nursing, More: Notes from the Nurse Execs Meeting in Boston

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week, the city of Boston hosted the annual meeting of the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE). For those unfamiliar with this group, it’s a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association and its mission is, according to the Web site, “to shape health care through innovative and expert nursing leadership.” It’s been a few years since I last attended this conference, and I was amazed at increase in both sophistication of exhibits and number and variety of sessions. There was even an iPad app for the meeting!

Best-selling authors abounded: Dan Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth of What Motivates Us, opened the conference and Thomas Goetz, executive editor of Wired magazine and author of The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine, closed the meeting. Dee Dee Myers, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton, also talked about her new book, Why Women Should Rule the World.

As at many meetings this past year, the Institute of Medicine’s Future of Nursing report figured prominently, with a track focused on interpretations and implementation of its recommendations.

I asked Linda Burnes Bolton, chief nurse officer of Cedars […]

A Nursing Report That Deserves More Than The Usual Shrug

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

The IOM report The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health came out this past October, causing a flurry of excitement among some in the nursing world and groans of “big deal” among others. My immediate instinct was to shrug my shoulders and wonder if yet another report will really make a difference at the bedside.

AJN addressed the report and its implications in our December 2010 and February 2011 issues—so I knew it must be very important. But, for some reason, I had assumed it was going to be a dry, unreadable bore. And I put off reading it until recently, when I needed to use it as a reference. And wow, was I in for a surprise! I especially liked the inclusion of real case studies of nurses from different backgrounds and work experience who are making a difference in health care.

It’s inspirational, and I encourage all nurses out there—and anyone with a stake in health care (that’s pretty much everybody)—to take a look. (Tip: I found downloading the PDF version didn’t take long, and it was much easier to navigate than the HTML version.) If you’d like to hear more on the report and what it means to nurses, sign up for our upcoming […]

On the Road to the Future of Nursing

By Shawn Kennedy, interim editor-in-chief  

I’m writing this on the train to Washington, DC, heading to the National Summit on Advancing Health through Nursing, which is taking place November 30 and December 1. This is the next step of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Initiative on the Future of Nursing (see my October 8 blog post) and will launch the Campaign for Action—the plan for implementing the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine’s report, The Future of Nursing. (You’ll be able to access the webcast and a live chat of webcast users on November 30 here.)

If you haven’t read anything about this initiative, do so. If you’re a nurse and plan to be working for the next 10 years, the recommendations from this report, if implemented, will affect you in some way. Expect to see changes in the following areas, to name just a few:

  • how and where nurses practice
  • undergraduate and graduate curricula
  • licensing and certification criteria
  • reimbursement policies
     

Other nursing initiatives have come and gone, some more successful in achieving their goals than others. AJN will cover the progress of this initiative as it attempts to evolve from a written report to an active process that creates sustainable change. As a start, in the December issue, now available at ajnonline.com, AJN brings you a guest editorial by Susan Hassmiller, director of the Initiative on the Future of Nursing. There’s also a summary and analysis of the report in […]

2016-11-21T13:14:49-05:00November 29th, 2010|career|1 Comment

Enough with the Scare Tactics: Some Follow-Up on the IOM Report on the Future of Nursing

Shawn Kennedy, AJN’s interim editor-in-chief, already posted here about the importance of the recently released Institute of Medicine Report on the Future of Nursing. Its implications are particularly profound at a time when we have a scarcity of primary care providers—and also at a time when the Affordable Care Act (i.e., health care reform) has designated more resources to nursing education and to generally making better use of nurses’ expertise. A number of bloggers have written about the IOM report, several of them expressing chagrin about the predictably naysaying American Medical Association response. Rebutting the AMA, the Center for Health Media and Policy at Hunter College had this to say. One working NP who weighed in on this topic is Stephen Ferrara, who noted (almost two weeks ago, in fact, though we missed it until now) the real world implications of the current situation for NPs in New York State, in a succinct post on his blog, A Nurse Practitioner’s View:

The bottom line is (at least in NY where I practice), without a collaborating physician on record, the 14,000 or so NPs are unemployed and can’t legally do anything that we were trained or educated to do. It is time to remove these non-evidence based barriers and retrospective reviews and allow us to function as true partners on the health care team. Collaboration among providers would still continue to happen and I promise pigs wouldn’t start to fly. Fourteen states have already transitioned to to an […]
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