Health Care Reform Must Target Hospitals, Physicians Who Push Expensive Treatments Over Prevention

But the cost of the hospitalization alone for an uncomplicated bariatric surgery is now about $28,000. That goes up to over $38,000 if complications arise—and almost $70,000 if the patient has to be readmitted. Now, what if a patient decides he'd like to go to a nutritionist every week for several years to gradually lose the weight and change his eating habits permanently? Let's say that the cost of seeing a nutritionist is $100 per visit—that's just over $15,000, but who's paying to put up signs advertising a hospital's nutritional service for weight loss ?

2016-11-21T13:22:38-05:00September 10th, 2009|health care policy|3 Comments
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Nurses Express Safety Concerns About H1N1 Vaccine

By Jacob Molyneux, blog editor

Nurse blogger Not Nurse Ratched has written a post on her decision not to get the H1N1 vaccine shot until she is more convinced of its safety.

I’m just urging caution against the knee-jerk fear reaction that is, no doubt, going to make hordes of people swarm out to clamor for this vaccine. I’ll be watching for more data on it and might modify my decision, but for now I’m going to just say no.

Judging from responses to a recent post we ran on the topic (“cancel my subscription” appeared more than once), the loudest clamor may be from those who are driven by fear of the vaccine rather than fear of the H1N1 virus. In the post in question, Doug Olsen, a nurse ethicist, examined the ethical side of the question of whether or not nurses should get vaccinated. 

(Whether or not you agree with Olsen’s guarded conclusion in favor of vaccination, his post demonstrated how a professional ethicist uses a set of concepts as tools—not to come up with a definitive answer that can be called “right” or “wrong” but instead to examine the moral dimensions of a decision. We hope that some of the concepts he used will be seen as tools to help nurses make their own informed decisions.) 

By way of update, here’s an addendum we received from Olsen that addresses some of the concerns about vaccine safety expressed in the various comments:

Any obligation of nurses to protect the patient by getting flu vaccine depends on trust in the science and in the system […]

2016-11-21T13:22:41-05:00September 9th, 2009|Ethics, nursing perspective|10 Comments
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“The nurse left work at five o’clock. . . .”: Three-Minute Fiction at NPR

By James M. Stubenrauch, senior editor

Here’s something AJN’s readers might be interested in: National Public Radio has been running a short-short fiction contest—stories that can be read aloud in three minutes or less—and posting some of the better ones on its Web site, here. In Round Two of the contest, there was one extra rule that writers had to observe: the story had to begin with the sentence “The nurse left work at five o’clock.” The winner will be selected by James Wood, book critic at The New Yorker, any day now.

I especially enjoyed “Working Hours” by Natalie Miller, which begins: “The nurse left work at five o’clock. My heart stopped beating at 5:01.” It’s wildly inventive writing, but I wonder, would this situation occur in hospitals today?

Also, there are some excellent stories that have nothing to do with nursing among the Round One entries (and, by the way, I notice some people have made use of the comments section to post their own short-short stories—hmmm). Happy quick-quick reading!

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2009-09-11T17:28:39-04:00September 4th, 2009|nursing perspective|1 Comment
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AJN Conference: It Won’t Be Your Typical Round of Lectures and Talking Heads

By Diana J. Mason, editor-in-chief emeritus

AJNConferenceWe at AJN know that there are myriad ways that nurses learn about best practices in care. While we hope you read AJN every month, we know that many nurses would like the opportunity to hear from and talk firsthand with experts in clinical care. On October 4, 5, and 6, you’ll have that opportunity in Chicago at AJN’s first conference: Advancing Excellence in Clinical Practice. This will not be the typical conference where you are lectured to endlessly. The sessions are designed for lots of interaction with participants, in the belief that building sound best practices requires critical analysis of the evidence, local adaptation of idealized approaches to care, and refining what works according to specific circumstances. […]

2016-11-21T13:22:46-05:00September 3rd, 2009|nursing perspective, nursing research|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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