About Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

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

Military Medicine Has a Head Nurse – Notes from Our Interview

By Maureen ‘Shawn’ Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

“Hi, this is General Patty Horoho,” and so began a phone interview with army nurse Lieutenant General Patricia Horoho, who was sworn in as the 43rd Army Surgeon General in December.

Horoho made history, becoming the first woman and the first nonphysician to assume command of the U.S. Army Medical Command, a $13 billion global health system. She had also been the first nurse to command Walter Reed Army Medical Center, taking over after a report  in the Washington Post revealed a host of deficiencies in care, housing, and processes at that facility, leading to the firing of the commanding officer, Maj. General George Weightman.

She was recommended for her new position by the prior Army Surgeon General, Eric Schoomaker, and it then went up the chain to the secretary of the army and the secretary of the defense, who then recommended her appointment to President Barack Obama.

We (there were representatives from four nursing publications on the call) spent over an hour peppering General Horoho with questions about her experience, objectives, strategic plans, and major challenges. Here’s a few of the highlights:

2016-11-21T13:10:36-05:00February 24th, 2012|nursing perspective|3 Comments
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Examining Our Biases About Mental Illness

“There’s nothing really wrong with him, it’s just anxiety.” How many times have you heard someone say this—or said it yourself? Mental health problems are among the most marginalized health conditions in the United States. They’re viewed as less “real” than physical illnesses; there’s no tumor to be palpated, no abnormality to be spotted on an X-ray. Emotional and psychological problems are often thought to be under a person’s control in a way that, say, multiple sclerosis or cancer is not. And because mental health problems can be construed as signs of weakness, sufferers may hide their symptoms. People who suffer from a mental illness need to feel comfortable seeking care and to trust that they’ll be treated with skill, compassion, and respect. This is vital: studies consistently find that mental illnesses, particularly depression, take a terrible toll on health. Such illnesses have been associated with an increased risk of stroke, coronary artery disease, and dementia, as well as increased mortality in people with cancer, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease and following a myocardial infarction or coronary artery bypass surgery.

That’s from “Examining our Biases About Mental Illness,” the Editorial in the February issue of AJN by clinical managing editor Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP-C. What biases and assumptions about the mentally ill, the depressed, the anxious have you seen in your practice? Do you ever find yourself slipping into such biases yourself as a kind of default setting?

2016-11-21T13:10:37-05:00February 24th, 2012|nursing perspective|4 Comments
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States Easing Up, Pediatricians Buckling Down on Childhood Immunizations

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

Two newspaper reports last week showed the dichotomy that exists in attitudes about mandating vaccines for children.

On February 15, the Wall Street Journal reported that more pediatricians are turning away families who refuse to have their children receive immunizations.

The next day, USA Today reported that several states are considering changing laws that currently allow parents to opt out of mandatory vaccines only for religious reasons, and extending the opt-out to include “philosophical reasons.” These reasons invariably come back to parental fears that vaccines put their children at high risk for autism. (See the our November 2011 report on what fueled this controversy.)

Highly publicized resurgences of measles and pertussis seem to have done little to change some parents’ mindsets about the need for immunizations. Has the success of the vaccines campaigns lulled some into a false sense of security—that the “risks” of vaccines, though unproven, are more dangerous than the diseases or their complications?

I shared in an editorial a story of a childhood friend who was left paralyzed in his lower extremities from contracting polio in childhood. And a cousin has a child, now almost 40 years old, who was left blind and speechless from encephalitis following measles contracted when she was five years old.

Cases like these are rarely seen anymore, but will they become more commonplace with more parents refusing to let their children receive vaccines? […]

2016-11-21T13:10:41-05:00February 21st, 2012|Nursing|9 Comments
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Blogroll Housecleaning Note

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This is just to say that we’ve done some minor housekeeping and deleted links to a number of blogs that have been asleep several months or longer. There’s nothing personal in this, and please let us know if one of these was yours and you’ve decided to revive your blog, give it an infusion of new design and energy, or the like. We want our blogroll to be useful, and it won’t be perceived as useful if we’re linking to sites that have gone dark. Please also let us know if there’s a really great nurse blog that we don’t know about, even if it’s yours. We can’t guarantee that we’ll link to it, but we’ll certainly check it out.—JM, blog editor

2016-11-21T13:10:44-05:00February 9th, 2012|healthcare social media|14 Comments
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A Face in a Village: Remembering a First Encounter with AIDS in Africa

We’d already guessed there was a problem at the health post—we hadn’t received the last several monthly statistical reports. As a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic in the early 1990s, I reviewed these reports as part of my job at the regional health office. Another part of my job was to join a supervisory team as it traveled over dirt roads to check on health facilities from hospitals down to the village health posts staffed by a single nurse. A few months into my assignment, on our way to the provincial hospital, the team decided to stop by this particular health post to find out why we weren’t receiving reports.

That’s from “A Face in a Village,” the February Reflections essay in AJN by Susi Wyss, the author of a well-received recent novel, The Civilized World (Henry Holt, 2011). Set in Africa, the novel, like this essay, was inspired by the author’s international health career. In this essay, Wyss recalls a vivid first encounter with the ravages of AIDS and the hopelessness it inspired. (Click through to the PDF version for a cleaner read.)—JM, senior editor

2016-11-21T13:10:46-05:00February 8th, 2012|Nursing|7 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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