Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor, Author at Off the Charts

Gallup Poll: Power Elite Believes Nurses Should Have More Say in Policy, Management

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Last week I attended a press conference in Washington, D.C., where the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released a Gallup poll it had commissioned to find out what 1,500 opinion leaders (or as Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport put it, “the people who run things in this country”) think about nursing leadership and nurses’ influence on health care reform.

It’s no surprise that most (69%) see nurses as having little influence on health reform. Nurses ranked at the very bottom—immediately below patients, who were below physicians in the rankings. Mary Naylor, an innovative leader from the University of Pennsylvania and part of a reaction panel, hit the nail on the head: “Everyone should be concerned that the largest group of health care providers and the consumers are the least influential.” (Those seen as having the greatest influence are government officials and insurance executives—no surprise there, either.)

In identifying what impedes nurses’ ability to be in leadership roles, here’s how the opinion leaders weighed-in:

69.3% noted that nurses are not seen as important decision makers as compared with physicians.
68% noted nurses were not seen as revenue generators like physicians.
62.4% think nurses are focused on acute care and not prevention or health maintenance.
55.8% think nurses lack a single voice in speaking on national issues.
50.9% […]
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Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:19:52-05:00January 25th, 2010|career, health care policy, nursing perspective|1 Comment

Praise for Haiti Nurse Volunteers–And a Word of Caution

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, interim editor-in-chief

As has happened many times before, nurses have stepped up to the plate in volunteering their services in the wake of the devastating Haitian earthquake. The California Nurses Association reported several days ago on its Web site that nearly 7,500 nurses had responded to a call by National Nurses United for volunteers. Nurses are also integral in the ranks of Médecins Sans Frontières , the International Rescue Committee, federal disaster response teams, and of course the American Red Cross.

What nurses should not do is take it upon themselves to fly to Haiti without being connected to an organized disaster group. Independent volunteers can create more problems and end up becoming consumers of disaster services instead of providers. As we noted in an AJN news article shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, “Because of the potential for injuries on site and subsequent health problems and stress syndromes, it’s essential that personnel location and hours spent at the scene be carefully monitored. Proper disaster management safeguards the lives of both victims and rescuers.”

Many first responders to the September 11 attacks subsequently developed respiratory problems; many suffered from depression. Many of these people had access to health care and counseling because they were monitored and registered and periodically assessed for postevent sequelae. But there were many “ad hoc” volunteers, who just showed up, without equipment, disaster training, or support. One wonders how many of these laudable volunteers […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:20:00-05:00January 21st, 2010|Nursing|4 Comments

Smokers Need Not Apply

By Peggy McDaniel, BSN, RN

Are you a smoker? If so, and you live in Chattanooga, TN, don’t even bother to apply for a job at Memorial Hospital, where being a smoker automatically disqualifies you. To ensure that job applicants are telling the truth, the hospital will subject them to drug tests—for nicotine! This new rule does not apply to current employees, but it does raise some interesting questions. The article notes that such requirements for hire could be a slippery slope on the way to other forms of discrimination.

As unpopular as this may be, as a fellow health care worker I can see a lot of positives to such a trend. In a previous blog post I discussed nurses as role models for our patients. My focus was on obesity, but I also mentioned smoking.

Another recent article, this one in the UK’s Nursing Times, says nursing students in Europe should be encouraged to stop smoking. The article discusses an Italian study reporting that nursing students are twice as likely to be smokers than are members of the general public. Maybe this would be a good policy to promote in the US? The article raises some of the same points I had raised in my earlier post about role modeling and the ways our actions or choices may influence our effectiveness as educators.

In addition to the health benefits in being a nonsmoker, there are also huge cost savings. As with obesity, smoking affects the overall cost of our health care system. The Tennessee health department […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:20:05-05:00January 20th, 2010|career, nursing perspective, students|9 Comments

In Medicine as in Aviation, Communication Breakdown Leads to Fatal Errors

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

Lately I’ve had communication on my brain. I’m always amazed that we get anything done in this world at the rate that messages can get lost in translation. For instance, I recently had a phone call from a mother of two girls who was upset about a medication error involving her 12-year-old daughter. While the mother was at work, the child came home from school with cold symptoms and a temperature of 102.5. The daughter called her mother and was told to take two tablets of Sudafed, which she did. About an hour later, the babysitter picked up the younger child, age nine, from school. Concerned that her sister was sleeping unusually soundly, the nine-year-old called her mother at work. Realizing that just giving her older daughter Sudafed hadn’t addressed her fever, she told her younger daughter to wake up her sister and have her take “two Advils.”

A few hours later the mother came home from work. As she was about to give her daughter another dose of medication before bedtime, she remarked to the children that she wished she had a combination drug containing both Sudafed and Advil so that the girl wouldn’t have to swallow four separate pills. The nin- year-old informed her that they did in fact […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:20:07-05:00January 19th, 2010|nursing perspective|3 Comments

Are We Trivializing Breast Cancer (and Demeaning Women) Even As We Raise Awareness?

Christine Moffa, MS, RN, clinical editor

I admit it. On January 7th my Facebook status simply stated “Black.” Normally I’m not a joiner, but when I received a message from a FB friend that said the following, “This is fun put just the color of your bra in your status and send an email to the girls only and see if the guys can figure it out, it’s to raise breast cancer awareness,” I only paused for a moment. While a small part of me wondered if it was legit, I changed my status and forwarded the message on to other friends.

It seemed cute and harmless enough—until today, when I came across Donna Trussell’s article at Politics Daily. Her arguments—in which she interrogated her own feelings (as an ovarian cancer survivor) about our culture’s seeming obsession with breast cancer awareness, and distinguished between feel-good awareness and real action—made a lot of sense to me. The whole thing reminds me of the April 2009 cover of AJN (image below) featuring a piece from the Artful Bras Project by the Quilters of South Carolina, also created to raise breast cancer awareness.

We received a lot of letters about that one, both positive and negative. Either way, it does get people talking. Is doing something as silly (and, to some, either sexist or demeaning) as this justified in the name of increasing awareness about a disease?