TAVR Review, Skin Tone Representation in Nursing Texts, and Other May Issue Highlights

The May issue of AJN is now live.

Here are some highlights. Some articles are open access or temporarily free; others will require log-in for access.

AJN senior clinical editor Christine Moffa’s guest editorial (free to read) addresses the 2026 Nurses Week theme—The Power of Nurses. “If there is a message to carry into this Nurses Week, it may be that the vigilance we practice at the bedside can guide us as a profession,” she writes. “Noticing what is subtle, identifying what is shifting, and acting before harm takes hold, these are skills we already possess.”

Over the past decade, transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) has become a transformative intervention for patients with aortic stenosis (AS). This month’s CE article, “The Evolution of Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement: From Novel to Normal,” (also free to access) reviews current approaches to evaluation, diagnosis, and management of AS before and after TAVR, as well as the evolving role of TAVR in the treatment of AS.

In their original research article, “Dark Skin Tone Representation in Foundational Nursing Textbooks: A Quantitative Image Analysis,” Eleonor Pusey-Reid and John Wong evaluate how prelicensure nursing texts visually represent clinical conditions across diverse skin tones, with a focus on the extent to which […]

2026-05-04T09:47:31-04:00April 23rd, 2026|Nursing|0 Comments
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School Nurses: A ‘Hidden Health Care System’ Finds a Voice

A blog is born.

Five years ago, I attended a blog writing workshop at the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) annual conference. It was led by Margaret Cellucci, the former director of communications for NASN. The hands-on workshop was a primer on blogging and included an assignment that the participants needed to submit a blog post about their conference experience before the end of the event. That is how The Relentless School Nurse blog was born. Five years, 818 blog posts, and almost 400,000 views later, I can say with confidence that school nursing is a vibrant and innovative specialty practice.

Amplifying the voice of school nursing.

My aim has been to amplify the voice of school nursing. At first, I focused on sharing stories from my health office. But soon I wanted to spotlight school nurses from around the country who were doing amazing things but did not have a national platform to share their experiences. As my readership grew, so did my reach and within a short time, I was highlighting school nurses from coast to coast.

To tell our own stories—not to boast but to educate.

Recognition in school nursing, like in most nursing, has been hard-fought, both within our own walls and outside as well. So many school […]

2022-05-11T10:32:27-04:00May 11th, 2022|COVID-19, Nursing, school nurses|1 Comment
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A Time to Heal: Taking a Break from Nursing After a Cancer Diagnosis

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

Most nurses I know enjoy Nurses Week as an acknowledgment of the very important work we do every day. Nurses’ Week can also be an opportunity to think about our own needs, or to practice “self-care,” a term I find problematic because I worry it has become one of those ideas that nurses get blamed for the absence of, as in, a nurse is stressed on the job because he hasn’t done his “self-care.” However, regardless of how management discusses “self-care,” it’s an important idea: that nurses need breaks, moments to relax, have fun, and nourish our own humanity so that we come to work ready to humanely care for patients.

The problem with doing a hard job, like nursing, is that recovery is hard, too, and when the job itself seems to expect employees to be superhuman, finding the will to really care for ourselves can be difficult. I discovered how truly challenging that can be after being diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in September 2017. At the time I was working as a per diem home hospice nurse and I knew instinctively that I could not care well for dying patients when I was worried about […]

2022-05-09T09:20:58-04:00May 9th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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RN Resiliency: Humor, Hounds, and Holistic Medicine

‘Even my hair is tired.’

If you’ve been faced with death, trauma, significant stressors, and losses, you’ve had to be resilient. And boy, did I choose a career with all of the above. I started my nursing career during the AIDS epidemic, and later moved to active duty Air Force nursing, travel nursing, polytrauma, rehab, chronic pain, spinal cord injury, working with the homeless, mental health, and lastly COVID-19. After 27 years of this, even my hair is tired. But I’ve never been so proud to pick this career—it is a calling. As Nurses Month begins, I tear up thinking there aren’t enough words to express my gratitude.

During COVID, understaffing, hourly policy changes, increased workloads and responsibilities, an increase in mental health disorders, the political climate, and anti-science rhetoric only added to the stressors. I had to look hard to find the gold, because every day you could definitely find the rust. I often asked myself, “How can I keep a healthy attitude, a warm heart, continuous focus, and a genuine nurse smile?” The answer for me has been my humor, hounds, and holistic medicine approaches.

Humor as stress relief.

This realization started when I landed in the ED after a period of not taking care of myself after learning my patient died by suicide. Me, […]

2022-05-04T09:28:13-04:00May 4th, 2022|Nursing, nursing career|1 Comment
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How to Support the Nurse in Your Life, May 2022

Photo by Dương Nhân from Pexels

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post directed towards friends and family members of nurses, entitled “How to Support the Nurse in Your Life.” While the ideas in that post still hold up today, so much in nursing has changed, the COVID pandemic being the obvious main factor. With nurses in more need of support than ever, I find it important to revisit this idea of helping friends and families supporting the nurses in their lives at this unique point in time.

1. Listen to what the nurse is actually distressed about in the moment, and stay with them there.

In normal, non-pandemic times, nurses already have many people, situations, and issues to tend to in addition to the actual patient. There are so many unique aspects of the nurse role that challenge us, all of them rolled into a tangled ball in the course of a 12-hour shift. If we are distressed about one particular aspect, please stay with us in your focus on the actual issue at hand so we have time and space to unpack it without all the other competing stressors vying for all our attention.

For example, we might be upset one day […]

2022-05-02T09:19:45-04:00May 2nd, 2022|Nursing|2 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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