St. Vincent's Hospital Archives

Dog Days of August Blog Roundup

What are nurses blogging about this August? (And why do they call these the “dog days”?) A random sampling of what crossed our desks:

The labor and delivery RN who writes the blog At Your Cervix has a nice short post this week on a team of nurses working together to avert a potential catastrophic event.

Artist, writer, nurse, JParadisiRN has a new post that takes the Steven Slater flight attendant incident as a jumping-off point to discuss what drives nurses crazy and unnecessarily slows down work flow. Her answer, in this post at least: waiting for the physician’s order.

Nursetopia writes of a few of her favorite things about being a nurse. (Preprinted physician order forms are one of them, to refer back to the previous post mentioned… So is working on Christmas Day.)

GuitarGirl RN asks why, why, why about the patients who come to the ER where she works. Why do they believe the Internet over the advice of their physicians? Why do they see a crisis when nothing is happening? And so on…

Ok, and just to balance things out, here’s one from Anonymous Doc, who asks why people in the end stages of terminal illness go on believing in long-shot treatments, and physicians go on giving them, despite the fact that he’s never seen a single one result in a miracle. In other words, when is hope justified, and when is it less […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:16:04-05:00August 18th, 2010|nursing perspective|2 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 […]