About Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

Senior editor, American Journal of Nursing; editor of AJN Off the Charts.

New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospital Settings – So What Else is New?

From Jason Pratt, via Flickr

A new report in Nursing Outlook (here’s the abstract) analyzes the experiences of new nurses. The news is not good. Actually, it’s really pretty awful when you think that much of what theses nurses complain about was documented in a book published in 1974 by nurse and researcher Marlene Kramer, Reality Shock: Why Nurses Leave Nursing.

The current report analyzes the nurses’ answers to an open-ended question that was part of a larger study of newly licensed registered nurses who’ve been employed less than 18 months. Researchers identified five themes among the 612 comments:

• Colliding expectations – The nurses expected the workplace to be more in keeping with what they were taught in nursing school; “high patient-to-nurse ratios were a particularly dominant source of stress.”
• The need for speed – The nurses felt there should have been more time for them to transition to carrying full responsibilities for patient care.
• You want too much – There were many complaints about the heavy workload, with little time to do it and little time to spend with patients.
• How dare you? – The nurses felt they were mistreated by nurse and physician colleagues and management.
• Change is on the horizon – Despite the […]

2016-11-21T13:24:48-05:00July 27th, 2009|nursing research, students|17 Comments
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Why Nurses Matter: NP’s Thorough Assessment Points to Cause of Infant’s HIV

A careful assessment by a nurse practitioner (NP) at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, uncovered a potential reason for an infant’s HIV diagnosis. The staff at the hospital had been stymied in trying to ascertain how a nine-month-old infant developed HIV after earlier tests had shown her to be HIV-negative. The mother, who was HIV-positive, had not breastfed the child, nor was there evidence of injury or sexual transmission, and the infant had not received blood transfusions. Marion Donohoe, the NP, in taking a detailed history from the mother, asked her about feeding practices, including pre-mastication. Yes, said the mother, she had been pre-chewing food for her daughter.

2016-11-21T13:24:51-05:00July 24th, 2009|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Update on Charla Nash, 2: Mauling Victim Doing Better Than Expected

I recently had an e-mail exchange with Michael Nash, the twin brother of Charla Nash. Charla was the victim of a chimpanzee mauling in February of this year. I first wrote a post about her in April and then an update on her condition in May. In April, she had just spoken her first words, her daughter’s name and her nurse’s name, upon waking from a medically induced coma. Michael tells me now that Charla continues to recover. Most of her physical wounds have healed, and she will soon be discharged to a rehab facility. She is blind and has prosthetic eyes.

2016-11-21T13:24:53-05:00July 23rd, 2009|Nursing|3 Comments
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Scaring Nurses Off Health Care Reform?

By fletcherwarren, via Flickr

An example of the kind of misinformation that is being spread to scare people about health care reform can be found in the Allnurses.com post quoted below. The altered U.S. flag image to the left (by fletcherwarren, via Flickr) suggests, with perhaps intentional irony, the McCarthy-era fear-mongering about socialism that seems to underlie many such blanket dismissals of health care reform. What do you think? And where are people getting such information?

. . . I just want to know If Im the only person who is considering not doing nursing if the gov’t goes through with universal health care. I was talking to my manager about this tonight at work and he was saying that Im probably not going to want to do nursing since nurses will make $9 or $10 an hour. I know nursing isnt about money, but that kind of money isnt worth going into nursing. You cant even live off that amount of money! Nurses now say they dont get paid enough for how hard they work and how much they have to put up with. Am I the only thats thinking like this?

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[EDITORS’ NOTE: COMMENT THREAD ON THIS POST IS NOW CLOSED. THANKS FOR ALL YOUR COMMENTS.]

2016-11-21T13:25:01-05:00July 22nd, 2009|health care policy|31 Comments
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Reform Watch: Insider Exposes Insurance Industry’s Practices; Obama Says Nurses Know Health Care Best

Kaiser Health News draws attention to a WSJ story about a former health insurance PR insider who’s been speaking out against insurance practices and the industry’s attack campaign against health care reform:

A former health insurance spokesman speaks out against insurance practices. The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones reports: “Wendell Potter, former chief spokesman for health insurer Cigna Corp., describes himself in his Twitter bio as a ‘journalist who spent 20 years undercover as HMO PR flack, now writing all about it.’ While Potter chuckles about the line, he is serious about his foray into the U.S. health reform debate, where he is campaigning for a public health-plan option and, with mild delivery and tough words, targeting what he calls ‘deceptive and dishonest’ tactics of a for-profit health insurance industry that’s fighting such a plan.” 

And in an interview with NPR (full transcript here), President Obama calls nurses “the people who know health care best” and says they are among those who know why we need health care reform:

JIM LEHRER: And you’re not — you will not be satisfied by somebody or some group or somebodies that say, “Well, OK, let’s do it — but we can’t do it now; we have economic things to do. We have other things in the economy to deal with; let’s wait a year, let’s wait six months. Forget it, huh?”

PRESIDENT OBAMA: If not now, when? We have literally been waiting 50 years and we still haven’t gotten it done. And the longer we delay, the more those special […]

2009-07-21T17:14:44-04:00July 21st, 2009|health care policy, 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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