About Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

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

A Little Levity to Ease the Family Caregiver’s Burden

Illustration by Hana Cisarova for AJN/All right reserved. Illustration by Hana Cisarova for AJN/All right reserved.

According to the CDC, almost 21% of households in the U.S. are affected by family caregiving responsibilities. The pressures and costs of this unpaid labor of love have been well documented.

This month’s Reflections essay, “Swabbing Tubby,” is written from the family caregiver perspective rather than that of a nurse. It’s about the wife and two adult daughters of an ailing older man as they are coached in one of the skills they will need to care for him at home.

It’s a tough situation, but one in this case leavened by the ability of these three women to laugh a little at the more absurd aspects of their predicament. Here’s the beginning:

In retrospect, I can’t help feeling sorry for the earnest young woman who tried so hard to show my mother, my sister, and myself how to hook up our brand-new, at-home, IV feeding device. She was all of 25, with the freshly scrubbed look of a young schoolgirl. Her youthful perkiness was no match for the trio of exhausted, crabby women who faced her across the empty hospital bed. Dad was down in X-ray having yet another CT scan, and the three of us were […]

2016-11-21T13:03:06-05:00February 2nd, 2015|patient engagement, patient experience, Patients|1 Comment
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Ebola Still Deserves Our Attention

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Photographed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) team member, and EIS Officer, Dr. Heidi Soeters during Guinea’s 2014 Ebola outbreak, this image depicts what resembled a garden of red- and green-colored gloves propped up on sticks in order to dry after having been washed in a hyperchlorinated solution, thereby, killing any live Ebola viral particles. The pink-colored gloves were merely inside-out red gloves with their interiors exposed. The image was captured on the grounds of Donka Hospital, located in the country's capital city of Conakry/CDC Taken by Dr. Heidi Soeters during Guinea’s 2014 Ebola outbreak, photo depicts red- and green-colored gloves propped on sticks to dry after being washed in a hyperchlorinated solution./CDC

It’s sad but not surprising that Ebola has all but disappeared from the headlines. After all, it’s not an imminent threat here anymore. […]

2016-11-21T13:03:08-05:00January 26th, 2015|infectious diseases, Nursing|1 Comment
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Calling All Nurses to Address Health Disparities

Susan B. Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, is senior adviser for nursing at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and director of the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action.

The author with nursing students at the Rhode Island Nurses Institute Middle College, the first charter school in the country for high school students who want to major in nursing. The author with nursing students at the Rhode Island Nurses Institute Middle College, the first charter school in the country for high school students who want to major in nursing.

The research on health disparities is stark and continues to increase. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Health Disparities and Inequalities Report–2013 found that mortality rates from chronic illness, premature births, suicide, auto accidents, and drugs were all higher for certain minority populations.

But I believe passionately that nurses and other health professionals can be part of the solution to addressing these disparities. Nurses are privileged to enter into the lives of others in a very intimate way—lives that are often very different than our own.

I understand that it is human nature to be more comfortable with the familiar, but this is not what we are called to in nursing. […]

2016-11-21T13:03:11-05:00January 16th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|3 Comments
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A Brief Meditation on Love, Loss, and Nursing

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN, writes a monthly post for this blog and works as an infusion nurse in outpatient oncology.

Manicure, by Julianna Paradisi, 2014 Manicure, by Julianna Paradisi, 2014

As a child, I remember being afraid to fall in love, because I didn’t want to experience the pain of losing people I loved when they died. I don’t know why I thought about this; I only know that I did.

Becoming a nurse has done absolutely nothing to alleviate this fear, but life experience has, to some degree.

Nursing is hard not only because we are there for the dying, but also because we are there for the illnesses and deaths of our own, the people we love, too. Making a living by caring for the sick and dying does not exempt us from personal loss. We grieve and mourn like everyone else.

Recently, I sat in a chair in an emergency department, noticing the sparkly red polish of a woman’s holiday manicure as she rolled past on a gurney. Clearly, she hadn’t anticipated an ER visit as part of her holiday celebrations either. On another gurney, next to my chair, lay my husband, getting an EKG, labs, and IV fluids. The prayer, “Please, don’t let it be a heart attack or a brain tumor,” wove silently through my thoughts.

We were lucky. There was […]

2016-11-21T13:03:11-05:00January 14th, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective|4 Comments
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Are Nurses Ready for Retirement? Apparently Not

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Photo by Judy Schmidt/CDC Photo by Judy Schmidt/CDC

If you ask many nurses in their sixties if they’re ready to retire, they may heartily say, “Yes, can’t wait.” But if the question is whether they are financially ready to retire, the answer may be quite different.

In their article in this month’s issue of AJN, “Preparing for Retirement in Uncertain Times” (free until the end of January), authors Shanna Keele and Patricia Alpert note that surveys reveal nurses to be unsure of how to begin preparing for retirement. A 2011 survey reported that “71% felt they were not saving enough for retirement”; another survey revealed that “59% of nurses do not know how to begin the retirement planning process” and most do not feel knowledgeable about investing and other related financial processes.

Keele and Alpert, who’ve conducted research around nurses’ readiness to retire, “explore the obstacles that nurses, especially female nurses, confront in planning and preparing for retirement. We outline steps nurses can take to begin the process; discuss various types of retirement accounts; and refer readers to helpful, free online resources.” There’s also a box that lists crucial steps to take if you’re getting a late start on retirement planning. […]

2016-11-21T13:03:17-05:00January 5th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|5 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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