About Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

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

Journal Watch: Short Takes on Recent Notable Research

This month we’re spotlighting our Journal Watch department. Here you can find short takes giving just the essential take-home points from notable studies that have been recently published in respected journals.

If you need to keep up with current research but don’t have time to do so, we suggest you start here each month.

The following six short articles will be free for the month of July.

Deprescribing in patients with a history of falls isn’t so easy, for either clinicians or patients. “Multifaceted, multilevel approaches are needed to overcome common barriers.”

Many women who have ovarian cancer still receive aggressive end-of-life care despite recommendations emphasizing early palliative care . . . and nonwhite women are more likely to receive aggressive care.

Discontinuation of thyroid hormone replacement is possible in some cases.
“Nearly one-third of patients remained euthyroid after discontinuation.”

Changes in ED use during the pandemic.
“Shifts in the pattern of ED visits . . . highlight the need for mental health, substance abuse, and violence risk screening and prevention during public health crises.” […]

2021-07-06T15:53:08-04:00July 6th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Making Relaxation a Priority as a Nurse

There have been a lot of articles lately about how people have adjusted their life priorities as a result of the pandemic—slowing down, going deeper into various pursuits, asking themselves what they really value in the face of life’s brevity. Many have faced terrible losses. Many others have made big changes.

photo by Meagan/via Flickr

The many faces of relaxation.

Now as summer really starts to get underway after this long and very hard year, it might be a good idea to give a little thought to how much we value relaxation. This means many different things to different nurses, as we learned back in 2010 when we asked followers on Twitter how they relaxed.

You can see some of the answers here; they included jogging and other exercise, spending time with family, taking hot baths, dancing, having a glass of wine, running a side business, making art, and spending time outside. In at least one case someone responded that relaxation was impossible because she was a nurse manager. […]

2021-06-18T12:25:27-04:00June 18th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Lost and Found in the Bronx

Before I could say another word, Mr. Smith cut me off. “I’m so happy you called. I’ve been so worried. I brought my wife to a hospital in Queens on Thursday night and I hadn’t heard from anyone since. But, wait—you’re telling me she’s in the Bronx now?” His tone seemed to shift from gratitude to anger as this fact sunk in. I looked at the date on the computer screen in front of me. It was Tuesday. 

“Lost and Found in the Bronx” is the title of the Reflections essay in the June issue of AJN. Author Kristopher Jackson is an acute care NP at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco and spent two weeks as a volunteer in the Bronx in New York City during the height of the pandemic. He centers his essay around his care of a frail, elderly woman on a COVID unit.

In an effort to determine whether she would want to be intubated or not, he reaches out to her husband, who apparently has been wondering if she is […]

2021-06-16T11:03:02-04:00June 16th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Accepting Patients’ End-of-Life Decisions Can Be Hard

“The most important decision an individual can make may be how much treatment they want at the end of life.”

photo from pxhere

When it comes to end-of-life decisions, it may be hard for a nurse to accept to support only what the patient wants, but it’s also vitally important. In the Viewpoint column in our June issue (Viewpoints are free to read), Nadine Donahue, PhD, RN-BC, CNE, describes caring for an elderly patient in his home as he begins to lose the ability to breathe on his own because of COVID-19.

When she implores the normally spry, physically active retired executive to let her call an ambulance to take him to the ED, he refuses. Writes Donahue, an associate professor of nursing at York College, City University of New York:

“He’d always told me that he believed in a time to be born, a time to live, and a time to die. He was not going to be attached to a ventilator and in a hospital if he could help it.”

[…]

2021-06-09T09:31:31-04:00June 9th, 2021|COVID-19, end of life|0 Comments
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Built for This: One NP’s Revitalized Practice

March 30, 2020, was the first day working at this clinic; it was the same day I was supposed to be returning from my honeymoon in Panama.

That’s from our May Reflections essay, “Built for This,” which is free for the rest of May (along with the entire issue, in honor of Nurses Month). Written by Janey Kottler, a family nurse practitioner and clinical instructor, the essay is about volunteering at a clinic on Chicago’s West Side, which was hard-hit by Covid-19. There she encountered families placed under impossible pressure and risk by the need to keep their jobs during the pandemic.

I think about the single mother and her two children I treated recently. The mother is an essential worker at a grocery store and utilizes her neighbor for childcare during work hours. The family’s neighbors are elderly: the wife stays at home while her husband is an essential worker, working on a factory line. They were grateful to have an income throughout the pandemic until her husband fell ill after COVID exposure at work. He has now inadvertently exposed his wife and the children she babysits.

[…]

2021-05-17T12:42:41-04:00May 17th, 2021|Nursing, nursing career, nursing stories|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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