So What? An Invitation to Nurses To Tell Us How They’re Translating Research into Practice

By Inge B. Corless, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, Boston, and Brian Goodroad, DNP, RN, AACRN, nurse practitioner and associate professor at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota

by centralasian/via Flickr

Crossing the Quality Chasm, an Institute of Medicine report from 2001, bemoans the chasm between our current research knowledge and the current state of care. Back in 2003, Don Berwick, now the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, provided the following pithy codification of the problem in a JAMA article called “Disseminating Innovations in Health Care” (subscription required; click here for the abstract): “Failing to use available science is costly and harmful; it leads to overuse of unhelpful care, underuse of effective care, and errors in execution.” Berwick pondered the slow pace of innovation adoption and attributed it to three factors:

  • the characteristics of the innovation
  • the characteristics of the potential adopters
  • contextual factors

Berwick also made this observation about innovations that do get adopted: “Health care is rich in evidence-based innovations, yet even when such innovations are implemented successfully in one location, they often disseminate slowly—if at all.”

Given these obstacles, what can be done to facilitate the integration of research findings into practice? What can be done to change this situation, and what would this entail?

One step is to […]

2017-05-27T10:28:00-04:00June 17th, 2011|nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment
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Year of the Nurse? ‘Don’t Get Mad, Get Elected’

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief—Comparing the increase of nurses in Congress in the 2010 midterm elections to the near doubling of the number of women in Congress back in 1992, an article in a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation electronic newsletter last week suggested that perhaps 2010 could be called ‘The Year of the Nurse.’ The article noted that there are now seven nurses in the U.S. House of Representatives—four Democrats and three Republicans—up from three in the previous Congress. This is certainly progress, but we’ve yet to gain a nurse in the U.S. Senate.

Nurses see the results of failed social policies every day. We do tremendous work providing restorative care, teaching self-care practices, and promoting behaviors that will maximize health. But how many of us seriously think of engaging in the politics of health care? Instead of promoting health and changing lives on a case-by-case basis, when you hold political office you can affect the health of an entire population. Nursing education provides us with an incredible set of skills: critical thinking, creative problem solving, people skills, time management, the ability to set priorities and to constantly reevaluate their order—to say nothing of multitasking. […]

2016-11-21T13:12:42-05:00June 15th, 2011|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Charla Nash Fights On

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief—This weekend, I saw an article about Charla Nash, the Connecticut woman who was viciously attacked in February 2009 by a friend’s chimpanzee. (Click image at left for article and video at CNN.) She had suffered terrible injuries to her face and hands that left her without hands and eyes and severely disfigured. Last month, she received a face transplant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She also received hand transplants, but they failed to take and were removed because of sepsis.

It’s truly a tragic story. Christine Moffa, our clinical editor at the time, wrote a few blog posts about Charla back in 2009. She’d seen Charla’s brother Steve on the The Today Show, where he’d reported that the first thing his sister had said upon waking from her coma was the name of her nurse, Lisa. As she wrote in that first post, “Steve Nash attributed her response to the nurse to the fact that the nurses had always talked to [Charla] as if she were awake.” (Subsequent posts by Christine included photos of Charla that her brother had been kind enough to share.) […]

2016-11-21T13:12:43-05:00June 13th, 2011|Nursing|0 Comments
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Getting Nursing News (Whether You Like It Or Not)

By Gail M. Pfeifer, AJN news director

During a recent public radio interview between Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and former senior advisor to President Obama, and Republican strategist Frank Luntz (author of Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear), Dunn remarked that folks “increasingly seek people they already agree with to get their news from.” (Here’s the show’s transcript.)

That is a sad commentary on the state of news journalism today. By definition, a journalist’s report should be fair and unbiased. And news reporting, above all, should be held to that high standard.

If you read AJN’s news department regularly (here’s the current issue’s table of contents; scroll down to find links to the new articles), and we hope you do, we should tell you how we try to maintain such standards. […]

2016-11-21T13:12:44-05:00June 10th, 2011|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|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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