About Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

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

One Nurse’s Ode to Fragility

Illustration by Lisa Dietrich for AJN. Illustration by Lisa Dietrich for AJN.

For nurses, the world outside work may from time to time seem as fragile and tenuous as the health of patients. Natural disasters threaten homes, illnesses afflict family members, the reminders of impermanence become too insistent. This month’s Reflections essay, “The Robin,” explores such emotional terrain with sensitivity and honesty.

Gentle warning: This is not an essay that neatly delivers a pearl of take-home wisdom at the end. But that’s what we liked about it. Sometimes the best we can do is hang in there and pay close attention. And, if we’re able and willing, write about it. Here are the opening few paragraphs of this short essay: […]

2016-11-21T13:01:56-05:00October 7th, 2015|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Message to Authors: Think. Check. Submit.

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Think. Check. Submit.

The above three words sum up the message of a new campaign to increase awareness among researchers and authors about predatory publishers—entities that take advantage of authors by unscrupulous practices that often leave the authors tied up in a contract and owing a large fee to publish in a journal that has little or no standing. (See my related editorial on predatory publishing in the April issue of AJN.)

Promising rapid publication, predatory journals lack peer review and fact-checking, often tout fake metrics, and may adopt names that are deceptively similar to those of established journals. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, has been tracking predatory publishers since 2009 and maintains a list of them on his Web site, Scholarly Open Access.

The Think. Check. Submit. campaign describes itself as an “industry-wide initiative that provides a checklist of quality indicators that can help researchers identify if a journal is a trustworthy.” It’s a new campaign “produced with the support of a coalition from across scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing.” In brief, it asks authors to:

THINK about where they should publish their work. Are the journals they are considering reputable?

CHECK the list of questions designed to help determine if a journal […]

2016-11-21T13:01:57-05:00October 5th, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Nursing Ethics: Helping Out on the Unit vs. Teaching Nursing Students Crucial Skills

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

scalesJust as no two hospital units are exactly alike, rarely are two ethical conflicts exactly alike. There are too many variables, too many human and situational differences. This month’s Ethical Issues column, “Teaching Crucial Knowledge vs. Helping Out on the Unit,” explores potential ethical and practical issues faced by a clinical instructor who must balance the duty to teach essential skills to nursing students against the staff’s need for help in meeting patient care needs.

Will there be an easy, cut-and-dried answer? Probably not. In the course of their analysis of a hypothetical scenario, the authors make the following point:

Because new situations arise all the time, and every situation varies in its ethically relevant aspects, rigid rules often cannot guide ethical action. Instead, analytic skills and transparent negotiation are crucial for resolving conflicts between values as they arise in day-to-day interaction—and for supporting the solutions we choose.

While people skills may be as important as abstract ethical analysis in dealing with real world situations, determining which ethical principles or priorities are coming into conflict may provide us with a certain measure of clarity in our approach. The authors frame the conflict described in the article in the following way:

[…]

2016-11-21T13:01:59-05:00September 23rd, 2015|Ethics, Nursing, nursing perspective, safe staffing, students|0 Comments
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Coming Home to Nursing: A Career Change Eases a Return to a Small Town

“Working as a nurse in the county where your family has lived for seven generations has a social complexity that can’t be prepared for.”

The Reflections essay in the September issue of AJN isn’t focused on a dire clinical situation, a wrenching ethical quandary, or a challenging coworker or boss. Called “Coming Home to Nursing,” the essay describes the many ways becoming a nurse helped the author begin to feel a sense of belonging when she returned to her small town. Here’s the opening:

Illustration by Gingermoth for AJN. All rights reserved. Illustration by Gingermoth for AJN. All rights reserved.

I had been taking care of people, in one way or another, for as long as I could remember, first growing up in Maine and then for 20 years in New York City. I had returned to my small town to help care for my mother, who had end-stage Parkinson’s disease. After she died, I felt a void. I looked around at this tiny place, where people are considered to be “from away” even if they’ve lived here for multiple generations. I wondered what I had to give back to the supportive community I’d grown up a part of—and I also wondered if I could fit in after 20 years away. Could I turn my love of […]

2016-11-21T13:02:02-05:00September 8th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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As with Ebola Outbreak, Social Determinants of Health Crucial in Recent Rural U.S. HIV Outbreak

Rachel Parrill, PhD, RN, APHN-BC, is an associate professor of nursing at Cedarville University in Ohio

by banditob/flickr creative commons by banditob/flickr creative commons

This past fall, with the world watching, a crisis unfolded in West Africa that challenged our understanding of sociocultural environments, epidemiology, and health. The spread of Ebola and the intercontinental transmission of the disease exposed weaknesses in our epidemiological defense system. It also drew attention to the powerful role that cultural beliefs and practices can have on disease transmission during outbreaks.

In that same time frame, and with similar cultural etiologies, another infectious crisis played out much closer to home. The setting: the rural Midwest, in and around the small town of Austin, Indiana. The disease: HIV. The crisis: an unprecedented outbreak—one with incidence rates (up to 22 new cases a day at the height of the outbreak) estimated to be higher than those in many sub-Saharan African nations and transmission rates through injection drug use higher than in New York City. Contributing to this “perfect storm” were socioeconomic factors characteristic of many rural settings, including poverty, low education levels, limited access to health care, and few recreational or employment opportunities.

In my work as a faculty member in a rural Midwest setting, I introduce undergraduate and graduate nursing students to concepts of public health nursing and try […]

2016-11-21T13:02:06-05:00August 25th, 2015|infectious diseases, Nursing, 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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