Improving Patient Throughput: Recommended Reading in AJN’s April Issue

The April issue of AJN is now live.

How can an acuity-adaptable model improve patient throughput and care? This month’s Original Research article, “Breaking Through the Bottleneck: Acuity Adaptability in Noncritical Trauma Care,” evaluates the implementation of such a model on a 20-bed noncritical trauma unit, examining the pre- and postimplementation metrics for throughput efficiency, resource utilization, and nursing quality indicators. (CE credit available)

Read “The Occupational and Environmental Hazards of Uncovered Toilets” to learn about the potential exposure risks associated with toilet plume aerosols—and how nurses can address these risks.

Crowdsourced registries have been used to quickly gather information, especially during emerging public health concerns. In “Developing Crowdsourced Clinical Registry Studies,” the authors describe the process of planning, developing, executing, and evaluating the crowdsourced COVID-19 and Invasive Cryptococcal Disease Registry, and highlight the use of a project management approach to successfully implement the resulting study. […]

2024-03-28T11:11:15-04:00March 25th, 2024|Nursing|0 Comments
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Just One Braid: The Power of Small Gestures to Restore Patient Dignity

Have you ever found yourself walking around your unit, overwhelmed by the prospect of managing your ever-growing workload? It sometimes feels like a never-ending cycle of assessments, medications, admissions, and discharges. I believe I’m not the only nurse who has experienced this frustration.

It is difficult to admit that, when COVID-19 entered our hospital doors, these thoughts consumed me. We witnessed the first casualties—not just of lives, but also of hope and intimacy—as we struggled to provide care and overcome our own anxieties amidst a scarcity of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Over time, we all learned a great deal about adapting to and managing a pandemic, and I have become more aware of my role within our flawed health care system. Focusing on my own fears and needs was valuable, of course, but these years opened my eyes to the injustices patients face. A significant proportion of the lives lost from COVID-19 due to ill-prepared infrastructure were from vulnerable communities. These realities transformed my perception of these injustices from distant awareness to concrete urgency.

Braiding a patient’s hair, restoring a sense of self.

The question of injustice brings to mind a recent encounter with a patient that deeply impacted me. This particular patient was young […]

2023-05-25T12:20:32-04:00May 25th, 2023|Nursing, nursing stories, patient experience|1 Comment
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Patient Input on Obstacles to Sleep Helps Focus One Unit’s Improvement Efforts

Do you know anyone who’s ever had a good night’s sleep in the hospital? As nurses, we hear the complaints; as patients ourselves, or as family members of patients, we’ve been there.

Differing views on the source of a unit’s sleep problem.

After their hospital’s 20-bed telemetry unit received a low HCAHPS survey score on a quiet-at-night question, nurse practitioner Christian Karl Antonio and his colleagues at a northern California community hospital took on the challenge of improving patients’ sleep experience on the unit.

Before designing an intervention, they spoke with patients as well as staff, and were surprised to learn that the two groups see the problem differently.

“Patients perceived being awakened for vital signs, blood draws, and medication administration as the most frequently occurring factors that contributed to noise at night. On the other hand, staff members perceived that noise at night came from staff conversations, equipment with alarms, announcements on the paging system, and delivery carts, among other sources.”

[…]

2020-10-08T10:01:55-04:00October 8th, 2020|family experience, Nursing, nursing research, Patients|0 Comments
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How Can We Improve the Hospital Experience of Visually Impaired Patients?

VIP Care Toolbox used in QI project

“Hello, I’m your nurse, Jane. Are you able to see me clearly?”

I have trouble functioning without a pair of eyeglasses within reach. If I were in the hospital without my glasses, I’d be at a loss—unable to read for pleasure, let alone read menus or instructions or consent forms. How much harder is it for people with moderate vision loss, or those who are totally blind?

Christine Carlson and her colleagues at St. David’s North Austin Medical Center in Austin, Texas, set out to answer this question. They met with visually impaired people in the community, reviewed the literature, and surveyed their own staff in order to learn the best ways to accommodate the unique needs of visually impaired patients, or ‘VIPs.’

In “Caring for Visually Impaired Patients in the Hospital: A Multidisciplinary Quality Improvement Project” in the May issue of AJN, the authors highlight how frightening and frustrating a hospitalization can be for those with limited or no sight, and share simple, practical interventions that can make an enormous difference in the safety and quality of a VIP’s hospital experience.

“I’m always afraid to go to the hospital. They don’t know […]

2020-05-21T09:52:23-04:00May 21st, 2020|patient experience, Patients|0 Comments
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Putting Down Her Burden: A Patient’s Final Choice

‘goodbye, inhaler!’

Chronic illness as a Sisyphean bargain.

Sisyphus was a legendary king of ancient Greece who was condemned by the gods to eternally roll a rock up a hill, only to have it roll down again each time as it neared the top.

Many people with chronic illness today may be able to relate. Chronic illness can mean years or even decades of worsening symptoms and ever more complex medication and treatment regimens, side effects of treatments, treatments for side effects, monetary pressures, activity limitations, a sense of separateness from the legions of the merely ‘walking worried’ around us, and the subtle pervasive tension and vigilance of never quite knowing what might come next.

The ironies of advanced medicine.

The assumption, of course, is that all the effort is worth it. And it is: many of us benefit from, or know people who benefit from, drugs that keep them alive when 50 or 100 years ago they would have died long ago, or keep them able to walk, or breathe without a struggle, or sleep without excruciating nerve pain or the itching of terrible skin sores, and so on. Life has always been about compromise; these are simply new refinements of a universal equation.

2020-01-23T10:03:01-05:00January 23rd, 2020|Nursing, nursing stories, patient experience|1 Comment
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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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