July 2009 - Page 2 of 7 - Off the Charts

Adherence to Evidence-Based Best Practices and Health Care Reform: What’s the Link?

Health care reform is the hot topic of the moment. But of all the proposals being thrown around, which one will actually address the quality of care? In a July 5 op-ed piece for the New York Times, Paul O’Neill, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, asked, “Which of the reform proposals will eliminate the millions of infections acquired at hospitals every year? Which of the proposals will eliminate the annual toll of 300 million medication errors?” These are excellent questions that both lawmakers and clinicians need to consider. […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:24:45-05:00July 28th, 2009|health care policy, nursing perspective|0 Comments

New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospital Settings – So What Else is New?

A new report in Nursing Outlook (here’s the abstract) analyzes the experiences of new nurses. The news is not good. Actually, it’s really pretty awful when you think that much of what theses nurses complain about was documented in a book published in 1974 by nurse and researcher Marlene Kramer, Reality Shock: Why Nurses Leave Nursing.

The current report analyzes the nurses’ answers to an open-ended question that was part of a larger study of newly licensed registered nurses who’ve been employed less than 18 months. Researchers identified five themes among the 612 comments:

• Colliding expectations – The nurses expected the workplace to be more in keeping with what they were taught in nursing school; “high patient-to-nurse ratios were a particularly dominant source of stress.”
• The need for speed – The nurses felt there should have been more time for them to transition to carrying full responsibilities for patient care.
• You want too much – There were many complaints about the heavy workload, with little time to do it and little time to spend with patients.
• How dare you? – The nurses felt they were mistreated by nurse and physician colleagues and management.
• Change is on the horizon – Despite the […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:24:48-05:00July 27th, 2009|nursing research, students|17 Comments

Why Nurses Matter: NP’s Thorough Assessment Points to Cause of Infant’s HIV

A careful assessment by a nurse practitioner (NP) at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, uncovered a potential reason for an infant’s HIV diagnosis. The staff at the hospital had been stymied in trying to ascertain how a nine-month-old infant developed HIV after earlier tests had shown her to be HIV-negative. The mother, who was HIV-positive, had not breastfed the child, nor was there evidence of injury or sexual transmission, and the infant had not received blood transfusions. Marion Donohoe, the NP, in taking a detailed history from the mother, asked her about feeding practices, including pre-mastication. Yes, said the mother, she had been pre-chewing food for her daughter.

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:24:51-05:00July 24th, 2009|nursing perspective|0 Comments

Update on Charla Nash, 2: Mauling Victim Doing Better Than Expected

I recently had an e-mail exchange with Michael Nash, the twin brother of Charla Nash. Charla was the victim of a chimpanzee mauling in February of this year. I first wrote a post about her in April and then an update on her condition in May. In April, she had just spoken her first words, her daughter’s name and her nurse’s name, upon waking from a medically induced coma. Michael tells me now that Charla continues to recover. Most of her physical wounds have healed, and she will soon be discharged to a rehab facility. She is blind and has prosthetic eyes.

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:24:53-05:00July 23rd, 2009|Nursing|3 Comments

Scaring Nurses Off Health Care Reform?

An example of the kind of misinformation that is being spread to scare people about health care reform can be found in the Allnurses.com post quoted below. The altered U.S. flag image to the left (by fletcherwarren, via Flickr) suggests, with perhaps intentional irony, the McCarthy-era fear-mongering about socialism that seems to underlie many such blanket dismissals of health care reform. What do you think? And where are people getting such information?

. . . I just want to know If Im the only person who is considering not doing nursing if the gov’t goes through with universal health care. I was talking to my manager about this tonight at work and he was saying that Im probably not going to want to do nursing since nurses will make $9 or $10 an hour. I know nursing isnt about money, but that kind of money isnt worth going into nursing. You cant even live off that amount of money! Nurses now say they dont get paid enough for how hard they work and how much they have to put up with. Am I the only thats thinking like this?