About Amanda Anderson, MPA, MSN, RN

Amanda Anderson is a PhD candidate and research project assistant at the State University of New York University at Buffalo School of Nursing and a fellow in Clinical Scholars, a national leadership program supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is also on the editorial board of AJN.

Bedpans and Learning: Nursing Basics Still Matter

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

Photo by Morrissey, via Flickr. Photo by Morrissey, via Flickr.

There I was, orienting to a busy medical ICU, perplexed over a bedpan. You’d think, since I was just graduating from nursing school, that bedpans would be my area of expertise. Critical thinking and vent strategies came easy; how could I possible admit I had no idea how to give a bedpan to a patient?

Frightening, to graduate from nursing school and a competitive externship program without this competency. Somehow, though, every unit I’d experienced offered patient care assistants, or patients who didn’t need this age-old tool. I’d certainly helped patients to the bathroom and cleaned incontinent ones. Despite the barrage of clinical learning, the basics of offering the pink plastic tool hadn’t sunk in.

Paralyzed, I stood with it in my hand, looking at my intubated, awake patient. I’d had the wherewithal to ask the family to step out, but couldn’t figure out which end went first. The horror of my preceptor finding it backwards would end me. Did the pointed end go towards the patient’s back? The larger end toward the feet for better coverage? Why couldn’t I remember?

Somehow, I managed to decide, […]

2016-11-21T13:02:43-05:00April 8th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement|7 Comments
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Workplace Conflict Engagement for Nurses: Consider the System

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

by Sachin Sandhu/Flickr by Sachin Sandhu/Flickr

This month, Debra Gerardi writes about initial steps to managing workplace conflict as nurses. The quotes below are from her article in the March issue of AJN, “Conflict Engagement: A New Model for Nurses” (free until April 30, the article is one in an ongoing series on conflict).

Just as with most medical errors, there is usually not a single cause of workplace conflict—instead, a number of interrelated variables lead up to an event.

Sure, I was new to nursing, but I wasn’t new to work. My life as the child of small business owners had ingrained in me a certain sense of duty that I felt my colleague lacked. When you grow up with parents who make you pick up cigarette butts in their business parking lots, no work is below you, and there’s no time to complain. Maya wasn’t new to nursing, but she seemed, to me, new to the idea that work was to be done without a fight.

In my first months on the unit, I saw her complain much more than I saw her put her head down and plod through the tasks before her. Our unit was full of really sick patients, […]

2016-11-21T13:02:50-05:00March 20th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Addressing Alarm Fatigue in Nursing

by flattop341/via flickr by flattop341/via flickr

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

“Will you please silence that alarm?!” The nurse is on the phone, and can’t reach the screaming cardiac monitor. It’s a normal request, considering that we’re working together in an ICU and the alarm has been ringing for awhile.

But her request for silencing the alarm isn’t issued to me; she’s talking to the unit clerk. Stuck in my patient’s room, I watch as this untrained staff member taps the flashing rectangle on the unit’s central monitor. Without having first been appropriately evaluated, the ringing disappears, along with the words “Multifocal PVCs.”

Later, the same unit clerk absentmindedly turns off a sounding alarm, without encouragement from a nurse. I’m floating today, and although I’ve just met her, I can’t help but ask, “Do you know what that alarm was saying? Was it accurate?”

She is clearly startled by my admonishment, but I persist. “A lot of the alarms around here do seem to be false, but what if this one wasn’t? Do you have the training to know the difference, and to report it?”

If looks could kill, the one that meets my gaze is certainly homicidal, but it’s paired with a grumbled promise to never touch the screen again. So maybe […]

2016-11-21T13:02:55-05:00March 2nd, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|5 Comments
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As the VA Regroups and Recruits, The Words of Nurses Who Served

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City who is currently doing a graduate placement at AJN two days a week. The AJN articles linked to in this post will be free until the end of December.

Vietnam Women's Memorial, courtesy of Kay Schwebke Vietnam Women’s Memorial, courtesy of Kay Schwebke

A scandal earlier this year about suppressed data related to long wait times for appointments tainted the credibility of the Department of Veterans Affairs. On this Veterans Day week, the new secretary of Veterans Affairs has been using incentives and promises of culture change to promote new hiring initiatives for physicians and nurses. The focus as always should be on the removal of the barriers many veterans face in obtaining timely, high quality care. Naturally, a number of these veterans are nurses themselves.

To commemorate those who have bravely cared for our country, and who deserve the best of care in return, we’ve compiled a few quotations from nurse veterans who’ve written for or been quoted in AJN about their experiences in successive conflicts through the decades. Thank you for all your service, and for what you carry daily—as nurses, veterans, and patients.

World War II
“I remember walking through cities leveled by bombs, looking at the hollow eyes and haunted faces of a devastated […]

2016-11-21T13:03:32-05:00November 14th, 2014|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Nurses, Brittany Maynard, Methods of Hastening Dying: No Easy Options

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City who is currently doing a graduate placement at AJN two days a week.

Last weekend, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard died, in her bed, in her bedroom, with her husband and immediate family beside her. I learned of her death on Twitter, along with millions of other readers. Several weeks earlier, Maynard had publicly announced, in a YouTube video, the way she planned to end her own life: using a lethal dose of medications prescribed to her for that purpose.

Maynard, while a compelling public advocate, is not the first to choose to die this way. Compassion and Choices, the organization that worked with Maynard to publicize her choice, lobbies for the drafting and passage of “death with dignity” laws, which currently exist in some form only in Oregon, Washington, Vermont, New Mexico, and Montana. Arizona.

In Oregon, where Maynard moved in order to be able to legally end her life before she was incapacitated by the effects of terminal brain cancer, approximately 71 other people made the same choice in 2013, the most recent year of reported data—the peak of a gradual increase from the law’s inaugural year of 1998, when 16 people did so.

Illustration by Denny Bond for AJN. All rights reserved.

2016-11-21T13:03:35-05:00November 5th, 2014|Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement|8 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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