On this month’s cover, a nurse provides care to a patient at Clearview Cancer Institute in Huntsville, Alabama. The photo was chosen as the third-place winner of AJN’s 2015 Faces of Caring: Nurses at Work contest. Photographer Kim Swift shot the photo while shadowing her sister, a nurse, for a day. Swift sought to capture what she calls “the trust factor” between patients and nurses. She found a prime example of that relationship when she noticed the way one patient looked at her nurse as he explained an aspect of her cancer treatment.
To read the first in a series of AJN articles on cancer survivorship from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, see “Adverse Late and Long-Term Treatment Effects in Adult Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Survivors.” This article—the first of several on cancer survivorship—summarizes the identification, evaluation, and management of potential treatment-related effects in adult survivors of hematopoietic stem cell transplants, with special focus on cardiovascular disease risk factors.
Some other articles of note in the November issue:
CE Feature: “Imagery for Self-Healing and Integrative Nursing Practice.” Research suggests that that the use of imagery can help reduce patients’ pain and anxiety and improve their quality of life and outlook on their illness. The second article in a five-part series on holistic nursing describes how imagery can be used to encourage patients’ healing process and presents an imagery technique and a sample script to use in practice.
Clinical Feature: “Prescription Opioid Analgesics: Promoting Patient Safety with Better Patient Education.” Inappropriate use of prescription opioids has increased sharply in the past two decades in the United States. Patients and caregivers must have an adequate understanding of safe use, storage, and disposal of opioids to prevent adverse drug events in patients and others. Using a case study, the author of this article examines the risks of nonmedical opioid use in postoperative patients and highlights the nurse’s role in patient education to avoid adverse outcomes.
From our Safety Monitor column: “Preventing Newborn Falls While Supporting Family Bonding.” Recent studies and reports suggest that newborn injuries, such as falls, may be an unintended consequence of leaving newborns with fatigued parents in the first hours and days of life. This article addresses the circumstances behind newborn falls in hospitals when infants are in the care of family members, and reports on steps hospitals—and nurses—can take to effectively prevent these accidents.
There’s much more in our November issue, including New York Times opinion columnist Theresa Brown’s new installment of What I’m Reading.
Click here to browse the table of contents and explore the issue on our Web site.
Thanks a lot for gathering them up. Gonna read the whole series