To Isolate or Not To Isolate (and Other Hot Topics at the Epidemiology Conference)
While most nurses are familiar with the arguments for contact isolation, the argument against it is fascinating.
What Matters to Today’s Nursing Students?
By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief
I just came back from the NSNA (National Student Nurses Association) convention in Orlando. What a crowd! There were over 3,500 attendees, mostly nursing students and some faculty. And contrary to what one usually thinks of students on spring break, this group was serious and focused. Some impressions I took away from the meeting:
- I was impressed with the many people pursuing nursing as a second career. I incorrectly thought several people I met were faculty because they looked older than many of the attendees—they were nursing students. One had been a marketing executive, one a financial executive (for over 20 years!), one a regional manager of a cosmetics company, another a stay-at-home mom for 10 years . . . not to mention a bank teller who had been a caregiver for a family member who was quadriplegic. They had professional resumes; plans A, B, and C for job hunting; and were focused and organized.
- Missing in the exhibit hall were hospital nurse recruiters. But presidents and representatives of nursing organizations were there, wooing potential new members either via booths or focus sessions. And with 80% of nurses not belonging to any professional association (according to Rebecca Patton, president of the American Nurses Association, in her remarks to the group), associations need to figure out what would make these future nurses join their ranks.
- Finding a job was the hot topic. I spoke with […]
Notes from the Nursosphere, Plus a Great Palliative Care Discussion
First: Twitter delivered a treasure this morning, from @abbrody (Ab Brody, an RN — and PhD — in San Francisco):
Wow,just wow! RT @DianeEMeier Pallimed:Post from husband of Dr. Pardi http://bit.ly/a3TH0X Do not miss this discussion! #hpm #palliative
What’s the big deal? Well, the New York Times ran a piece this week about Dr. Pardi, a palliative care doctor who fought it out against her cancer up to the end. The article was fascinating, disturbing, powerful, and we posted about it—and a related article we’d run in AJN not long ago—at this blog a few days ago.
What Brody’s Twitter message alerts us to today is an ensuing post and discussion at the palliative care blog Pallimed. The discussion has none of the harshness of tone one sometimes gets on Web discussions. Many of the people in the palliative care community seem to know each other, which always helps keep things civil (you don’t typically insult people you’re likely to meet in person).
A big question in the discussion is whether the Times story oversimplified the issues, creating an “either/or” scenario out of something much more complex, and in the process made palliative care look like it’s all about convincing people to give up and die. But it really gets interesting when Dr. Pardi’s husband pops up in the comments section and attempts to clarify some of the questions and misperceptions raised by the Times story. You’ll […]
To Address High Turnover Among New Nurses, A Virtual Training Tool With Real-Life Problems
At this week’s National Student Nurses Association conference in Orlando, Johnson & Johnson’s Campaign for Nursing’s Future is unveiling a free virtual training program called Your Future in Nursing, which can be found at the Web site DiscoverNursing.com. (Sidenote: the site has many other resources for men in nursing, student nurses, and others, including a fairly vast collection of Profiles in Nursing, which is worth browsing through to get a sense of the really broad range of people who work in the nursing profession.)
You can download the virtual training program for free or order the CD through the DiscoverNursing.com Web site. Designed to address the extremely high turnover rates among first-year nurses who often feel woefully unprepared for the realities of the workplace, the program (full disclosure: we’ve watched a trailer, but we haven’t tried it yet ourselves) sounds intriguing (and a virtuous subsitute for a half hour spent on Facebook):
The interactive training tool allows nurses to select a 3D nurse character and navigate through the rooms of a virtual hospital. As they tour the hospital, nurses interact with animated versions of the people who will shape their first year on the job – hospital administrators, nurse managers, doctors, other nurses, patients and their families. Nurses work at their own pace to respond to different, real-life nursing scenarios they would normally encounter throughout the hospital. In addition to getting immediate feedback on each answer, sections close with a video message from an experienced nurse mentor who […]
Nursing Handoffs: Do We Know What Constitutes Best Practice?
By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor
A systematic literature review on nursing handoffs, written by nurse researcher Lee Ann Riesenberg and colleagues and featured as a CE article this month, might just shock you. The researchers found that although there is “abundant evidence that poor communication and variable procedures result in inadequate handoffs,” surprisingly little is known about what makes nursing handoffs effective. Which is kind of incredible, given how crucial handoffs are to providing safe and effective patient care.
Of the 95 English-language articles that met the researchers’ inclusion criteria, just 20 reported on research on nursing handoffs, and only 3 were found to be of reasonably good quality (scoring above 10 on a 16-point scale). The researchers concluded that although “the Joint Commission is calling for structured handoffs . . . we found very little evidence to support the use of any specific structure, protocol, or method.”
Barriers and Strategies
But the researchers were able to identify, categorize, and list numerous barriers to and strategies for handoffs that were mentioned in the literature. […]