PPE’s Contribution to the Plastic Pandemic

“It’s estimated that it could take 450 years to completely decompose a surgical mask.”

Personal protective equipment (PPE) is critically important for health care workers; however, use of PPE is also contributing to environmental disaster. The COVID-19 pandemic and the monkeypox outbreak underscore how crucial protecting frontline workers is for their health and for public health at large. What is yet unclear are the environmental implications of our extensive PPE use during the pandemic. Nurses must have prominent voices at the table when discussing the future of PPE and how to deal with waste.

In the United Kingdom alone it was reported that over a period of just 53 days, 748 million PPE items were used in hospitals. In 2020, over 6.76 billion PPE items were distributed in England, three times the usual amount. Several countries reported over a 350% increase in medical waste during the height of the pandemic. During two years of the pandemic, it’s estimated that over 900 million tons of plastic waste was generated.

This ‘plastic pandemic,’ which is now a global threat that has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, began in the 1850s when early forms of plastic began replacing natural materials. Despite recycling efforts, over 60% of plastics are estimated to remain […]

2022-09-20T09:37:57-04:00September 20th, 2022|environmental health, environmental health, Public health|0 Comments
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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 […]

2022-05-02T09:19:45-04:00May 2nd, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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Spotlight on the Art of Nursing

Duty, colored pencil on paper, 8” × 10”, 2021. © Isabella Calisi-Wagner.

AJN‘s Art of Nursing column this month features Duty, a drawing of a nurse who cared for New York City artist and writer Isabella Calisi-Wagner as she recovered from emergency brain surgery in 2020. Calisi-Wagner remains friends with the nurse today. She says she drew the portrait to “celebrate the dedication of nurses.”

Another recent artwork honoring nurses in AJN is Double Shift, a charcoal drawing by artist and retired RN Therese Cipiti Herron. She explains that the image captures the “essence of exhaustion” experienced by nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, referencing nurses being utilized for extended shifts and performing in crisis mode. “I salute nurses as they carry on like never before,” she says.

Double Shift, charcoal on paper, 11” × 14”, 2021. © Therese Cipiti Herron.

In the early days of the pandemic, news reports about health care workers’ lack of access to adequate PPE inspired artist Jim Leitz to paint Get Them What They Need! This work was featured in AJN‘s June 2020 issue.

Get Them What They Need!, watercolor, 5” × 5”, 2020. © Jim Leitz.

Each month in the Art of Nursing column, AJN publishes visual art and poetry related to nursing, health, and health care. Interested in submitting […]

2022-03-09T09:25:13-05:00March 9th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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A Call for a More Balanced Approach to Family Presence During a Public Health Emergency

What would you want for your family?

Nine years ago, AJN published a Viewpoint article asserting the essential role of family caregivers. The article featured an elderly woman recuperating in a hospital, her daughter at her bedside planning for discharge with the care team. The authors argued that family engagement creates the foundation for safer care, better patient outcomes, and greater efficiency for nurses.

The same patient’s experience would likely have been very different during the Covid pandemic, especially during the intermittent surges over the past two years. The patient would be alone in the hospital, her daughter’s assurances communicated through a digital tablet. Overstretched nurses would provide updates to the family over the phone. Discharge education would occur through a car window moments before the patient’s daughter drove her home, feeling unprepared for what came next.

COVID-19’s highly transmissible properties have complicated the family engagement equation. Over the past two years, hospitals and nursing homes have enacted, eased up on, and then reinstated visitation bans, at times leaving questions as to whether restrictions implemented to reduce disease spread may be more detrimental than beneficial.

As we contended in recent months with the extremely contagious Omicron variant, family caregivers who had assumed an essential role as advocate, […]

2022-03-02T10:21:04-05:00March 2nd, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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Can Grieving Loss of Idealism in Nursing Give Room for New Hope?

It is no secret by now that the pandemic has dealt blows to morale in nurses like never before. The issues are being voiced everywhere—nurses find themselves overworked, understaffed, underpaid, disrespected by both the health care system and many in the general public, in sometimes deeply startling ways.

As professionals who come to work every day looking to help, restore, and heal, we found ourselves losing our idealism about our profession. On top of our ongoing grief over our patients—both COVID and non-COVID related—we’ve also felt the loss of watching increasing numbers of beloved colleagues either leave the profession or leave our units, often because of preexisting issues highlighted by the stresses of the pandemic.

This is not at all to say that their reasons for leaving are wrong. It’s only to say that those of us who stay feel the grief of seeing them leave and wonder anew about our own longevity in this work, even as we support their decisions and wish them well.

Four motivations that have kept me in nursing.

This has left me inevitably asking myself why I still stay. My motivations for staying in this work and in my current workplace are:

  1. To provide meaningful, helpful care to my patients and families.
  2. To work in a supportive environment that is life-giving and […]
2022-01-28T09:57:59-05:00January 28th, 2022|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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