Disabled Musicians Featured in Podcasts, AJN Cover, Subject of Oscar-Winning Film

  

By Shawn Kennedy, interim editor-in-chief

At the Academy Awards ceremony last night, “Music by Prudence,” the documentary about Prudence Mabhena, won the award for best documentary short. Prudence is the lead singer of Liyana, a group of young Zimbabwean musicians who graced the above cover of our August issue last year. All of the band members have some kind of disability and attended the King George VI School and Centre for Children with Physical Disabilities in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. When they performed throughout the United States last year, AJN’s senior editorial coordinator Alison Bulman interviewed them after their concert in New York. 

Go here for links to podcasts of interviews with the band and the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Roger Ross Williams—and also to some of the music of Liyana (the podcasts will load, but right now can take up to 30 seconds on some computers!). You can also read Bulman’s short article about this remarkable troupe here, or a blog post about Liyana we published some months back. Congratulations to Liyana, and to Williams, who helped them tell their story!

(And click here to read an interview posted yesterday on Huffington Post and WalletPop with Alison about her experience interviewing the film’s director and producer, whose  relationship has been the subject of controversy since an awkward moment at the Academy Awards ceremony.)

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2016-11-21T13:18:55-05:00March 8th, 2010|patient engagement|0 Comments
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Notes from the Healthweb and Nursosphere

This week Not Nurse Ratched has an amusing, meandering, and thoughtful post about the uses of Facebook by patients in the hospital. There’s a short excerpt below, but read the whole thing here.

They update Facebook constantly. CONSTANTLY. They have us take photos of injuries they can’t reach so they can post the photos to Facebook. I am not making this up. “I want a photo of my hideously dislocated ankle/knee/shoulder but I can’t move, so would you mind using my phone to take a picture for me?” And they keep updating and updating. I have actually said, “I’m about to give you a medicine that is going to render you unconscious immediately, so you should set your phone down.”

How could we have a weekly Web roundup that doesn’t at least mention health insurance reform? The spotlight has been slowly turning toward the insurers themselves, a crucial part of the equation (along with cost control and many other factors). This week Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius met with the top executives of insurance companies to demand an explanation for the steep increases in rates seen in the last year.

If you’re looking for yet another reason why processed food isn’t good for you (besides the frequent presence of high fructose corn syrup and massive doses of salt, and the inaccurate packaging claims that the foods are “healthy” and “lean”), this week the NY Times reported news […]

2016-11-21T13:18:59-05:00March 5th, 2010|health care policy, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Is This Teamwork? Learning to Supervise Isn’t Easy

By Sheena Jones, who attends Dutchess Community College and lives in Beacon, NY

So I’m a young nurse, one of the youngest in my facility. I used to be a nurse’s aide; now I’m an LPN in training to be an RN. It’s very difficult when the aides are either the same age as me or old enough to be my grandmother.

What do you tell a 19-year-old aide who just got mandated for a second shift on a Saturday evening and who is texting all shift but getting her work done? Do you tell her to put it away, knowing that you would be doing the same thing if you were still a young aide and had already gone the extra mile to check that all the patients were safe and happy?

What do you tell the 57-year-old aide who is always the last one struggling to finish her assignment because she can’t keep up? She can’t get her two baths done plus get the other eight residents washed and in bed by 10 pm, even though everyone else is done by 8:30 pm. Do you tell her to hurry up and finish? Do you send the frustrated younger aide to finish her assignment, and call it ‘teamwork’? Who wants to do extra work? 

This is the situation I face every couple of weekends. I’ve tried changing the aide assignments to make the older aide’s workload easier, but she just can’t seem to work fast enough no matter what I do. I have a frustrated younger aide who […]

2016-11-21T13:19:01-05:00March 4th, 2010|nursing perspective|17 Comments
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‘Ask Me Three Questions’: Engaging Patients to Promote Safety

By Peggy McDaniel, BSN, RN

Next week, March 7–13, is Patient Safety Awareness Week. The National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) has sponsored Patient Safety Awareness Week since 2002 to help promote awareness of patient safety issues among hospital staff, patients, and communities. This year’s campaign focuses on engaging patients in theior own care, and it draws upon the NPSF template “Ask Me Three,” which encourages patients to ask these questions:

  1. What is my main problem?
  2. What do I need to do?
  3. Why is it important for me to do this?

[…]

2018-03-13T10:46:32-04:00March 3rd, 2010|health care policy, Nursing, patient engagement|0 Comments
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Why the ‘Greatest Generation’ Is Bagging Groceries (No, It’s Not Because of Taxes)

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief

In surfing the Web Monday, I came across this interesting tidbit on the blog run by Gary Schwitzer, creator of HealthNewsReview.org, a site devoted to assessing the accuracy of health news coverage. He quoted statistics from a report  by the Center for Public Integrity, which claims that “there are eight lobbyists for every member of Congress.” The number of lobbyists went from about 1,400 in the first quarter of 2009 to nearly 3,700 by year’s end. 

I see elderly people in the supermarket bagging groceries—some may like the company, but others are doing it to pay for medical care not covered under plans. My uncle—one of the “greatest generation”—used to cut his pills in half to make them last longer. Does this qualify as “rationing care”? […]

2016-11-21T13:19:04-05:00March 2nd, 2010|health care policy, nursing perspective|5 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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