photo-essay Archives - Off the Charts

A Year of Nursing, in Photos

During National Nurses Week, a reflection on nursing in the pandemic and plans to continue spotlighting the global contributions of nurses and midwives.

Photo courtesy of Jhpiego, by way of International Confederation of Midwives.

One photo shows a proning team at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago turning a patient. The photo that accompanies this post shows a midwife in head-to-toe personal protective equipment as she provides breastfeeding counseling to a woman wearing a mask and holding her newborn in a hospital bed in Kabul, Afghanistan. A third focuses on more than 150 white clogs—each pair representing a nurse’s life lost during the pandemic—placed on the lawn outside the U.S. Capitol.

Reflections on the essential care nurses provided this year.

These are just some of the images included in the May issue’s feature article, “A Look Back at the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.” This photo-essay highlights the diverse experiences of nurses and midwives globally in the last year and the variety of ways they responded to these circumstances.

The photos depict resilience—a group of nurses and physicians with their names and smiley faces drawn on […]

Corinne McSpedon, senior editor2021-05-07T11:05:47-04:00May 7th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments

Requiem for New York’s St. Vincent’s Hospital

A community in mourning leaves its messages

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editorial director/interim editor-in-chief

Each day, Alison Bulman walks by the closed doors of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village on her way to work as the senior editorial coordinator at the American Journal of Nursing. She has watched the number of testimonies left on the doors boarded up in April grow, as former patients leave messages of gratitude, anger, and sorrow for the loss of this 160-year-old institution. Alison thought they were worth sharing, and we agreed. So she took a great series of photos, which we’ve now collected in AJN‘s Flickr stream.

My first news story for AJN was about four nurses who worked at St.Vincent’s and who died while vacationing together. And in AJN’s first issue after September 11, 2001, we wrote about St.Vincent’s major role in treating victims and first responders after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

As a New Yorker and a nurse, I share the sense of loss felt for this venerable institution—not as much for its past as for the loss of a major health care center in a community that depended on it for access to care. The closing of the emergency department has already had repercussions: the Wall Street Journal reported on June 17 that ER visits in the surrounding hospitals were up. And midwives who practiced at St. Vincent’s were left in the lurch without physician back-up agreements […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:16:54-05:00July 6th, 2010|Nursing|8 Comments

Photo-essay Depicts Home Nursing in Gaza Strip; All AJN May Articles Free for Next Two Weeks

The above photo is from a photo-essay on home nursing in the Gaza Strip that appears in the May issue of AJN. The text and images depict Palestinian nurses trained by a medical aid organization called Merlin to attend to local communities in need, especially those cut off from urban health care services. Have a look (since it’s a photo-essay, we suggest you click through to the PDF version once you reach the article).

In honor of Nurses’ Week, which occurs in early May, this and all other articles in AJN will be free from now until May 15. At all other times, the departments and article types listed below are always free (along with other selected articles):

Reflections, a monthly personal essay from a reader
Viewpoint, a position piece from an expert or concerned citizen
news articles like this on turf wars between physicians and nurse anesthetists, this on the continuing trickiness of treating sepsis, and this on a new plan for radiation safety
Art of Nursing (it’s a poem this month; click through to the PDF to read it)
the editorial
letters like this one on end-of-life opioid use
CE features such as this comprehensive look at asthma in adolescents and adults

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:17:56-05:00April 29th, 2010|Nursing|0 Comments

Photo-essay from Vancouver: Street Nursing as ‘Harm Reduction’

Injection drug users say they often encounter discrimination in mainstreamcare settings; many delay seeking care until they’re extremely ill, at which point their care can be very costly, and that affects everyone. Indeed, any unsafe behavior (such as needle sharing) that raises the rate of bloodborne infection has significant consequences for individuals, communities, and overall public health. Many believe that improved community care that includes harm reduction measures can reduce rates of ED use, hospitalization, incarceration, and public drug use