At this blog we’re not always devoted practitioners of the art of the list. Used too often and too cynically (some of the more mysterious nursing blogs consist entirely of lists of articles and excerpts from other blogs), lists can be just another form of journalistic cannibalism.

But it sometimes occurs to me, as I publish a new post that takes its place at the top of the home page and pushes all those below down another notch (until, after a few such nudges, they gradually fall off the page, entering the purgatory of the blog archives), that this isn’t entirely fair.

While blogs allow for quick reaction to a news story, a public health emergency or controversy, a new bit of published research, they are also places for writing that isn’t so narrowly tied to a specific date and event. Many thoughtful posts by excellent writers have been published here in the past couple of years. With this in mind, here’s a list of the 10 most read blog posts for the past 90 days. It doesn’t mean that these are necessarily the very best posts we published in that time, or that they were even published in the last 90 days . . . but it’s one way of measuring relevance.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor 

1. Dispatches from the Alabama Tornado Zone
This one is actually a page with links to a series of powerful and thought-provoking posts by Susan Hassmiller, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, who volunteered with the Red Cross after the devastating Alabama tornadoes in late April of this year.

2. Notes of a Student Nurse: A Dose of Reality
This honest account of a first semester of nursing school is by Jennifer-Clare Williams, a student at Cox College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Springfield, Missouri. We hope to have more of her posts in the future.

3. Bullying Wars: Theresa Brown vs. ‘the entire physician profession’
AJN‘s editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy comes to the defense of nurse and author Theresa Brown, who dared to write about physicians who bully nurses.

4. New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospital Settings – So What Else is New?
We ran this one two years ago, but it’s as relevant as ever for nurses who’ve just graduated from school and are starting out in a new job—and for the nurses who work with them.

5. Don’t Cling to Tradition: A Nursing Student’s Call for Realism, Respect
By Medora McGinnis, a student at Bon Secours Memorial College of Nursing in Richmond, Virginia, this post got a lot of attention with its assertion that “nontraditional” nursing students may be the new normal.

6. What Is Meaningful Use? One Savvy Nurse’s Take
By Jared Sinclair, an ICU nurse in Nashville who has a blog about health care and technology, this post demystifies for nurses some of the issues associated with electronic health records.

7. Workplace Violence Against Nurses — Neither Inevitable Nor Acceptable
A look at some helpful articles that have addressed aspects of this perennially troubling issue.

8. Is the Florence Nightingale Pledge in Need of a Makeover?
By former AJN clinical editor Christine Moffa, this post asked whether the ‘Nightingale Pledge’ really speaks for nurses today. The post elicited some strong reactions.

9. The Monkey in Room 100
By an assistant professor in the division of nursing at Shenandoah University in Virginia, this post tells a story of the thoughtful and creative hospice care received by the author’s mother.

10. New Medical Residents and Patient Mortality – Does the ‘Nurse Effect’ Lessen the ‘July Effect’?
Another good one by AJN‘s Shawn Kennedy. Here’s an excerpt:

I remember working in the ED when the new residents on call would come to see patients, their “whites” impeccably spotless and starched, with new blank index cards in their pockets, looking eager and anxious to finally be getting to the real work of their profession.

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