About Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

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

The Slow Old Days

Christmas cards with angels, scandinavian “nis...

By Maureen “Shawn” Kennedy, interim editor-in-chief

On this past Monday at Slate, writer Kate Julian, lamenting that her mailbox was devoid of cards this season, asked, “Did Facebook Kill the Christmas Card?” She went on to detail all the ways people can connect online nowadays, making a case that the traditional “here’s what I’ve been doing all year” card is going the way of the little black address book and pocket calendar.

I’m not so sure we can put all the blame on Facebook. In my own case, I was (and still am) unprepared. I just know Christmas came earlier this year—I don’t know how they did it, but somehow the calendar seemed to do one of those Star Wars hyperspeed jump things, where lights whiz by and you’ve jumped light years ahead. I remember Halloween, and then there was Thanksgiving . . . but wasn’t that just last week?

Or maybe it only seems that way because with technology we can now work more efficiently and be more productive in less time. But where IS all this time I’m saving with technology?

This time of year makes me think of childhood Christmases, but not so much my own. My mother grew up in a small New England town during the 1930s; it was always cold and snowy. It was a mill town and no one had money […]

2016-11-21T13:14:34-05:00December 22nd, 2010|Nursing|2 Comments
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‘At the Night Camp’: How Assumptions About Patients Can Blind Us

The entire time he was with us he kept looking around, eyes darting back and forth and toward the truck he’d driven, which he told me wasn’t his own. He shifted uneasily in his chair, and I felt the impulse to try to comfort him and tell him we could help.

That’s an excerpt from “At the Night Camp,” the December Reflections essay in AJN. The essay, by Meg Sniderman, a student in the MSN program at Emory University School of Nursing in Atlanta, takes a wry, honest look at the ways we can imagine whole lives for those around us based on their cultural identifiers, yet often miss the most obvious things about these patients . . . the things that make them just like us, despite apparently vast cultural differences.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

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2016-11-21T13:14:39-05:00December 17th, 2010|nursing perspective, patient engagement, Public health, students|0 Comments
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Amazing and Disheartening: How We Continue to Fail Family Caregivers

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Recently, as part of an ongoing collaborative initiative on supporting family caregivers with AARP (see the comprehensive, and free, AJN supplement called State of the Science: Professional Partners Supporting Family Caregivers), I listened to a group of family caregivers talk about what it’s like to care for sick parents and relatives at home. 

Most of the caregivers were in their 60s and retired, and now found themselves doing the back-breaking work of being on call 24/7, attending to everything from bathing and feeding to chauffeuring to health care appointments, paying the bills, and running the household—sometimes two households, if they lived apart from the person for whom they provided care.

It was amazing and disheartening to listen to them—amazing in terms of the lengths they went to make sure they were doing the right things, and disheartening because they were mostly on their own, with little support from the health care system. And this was right from the start; all said that information to prepare for the transition from hospital to home had been lacking. For the most part, families looked to the family physician to answer questions about what they would need to do at home—nurses were hardly mentioned.

What They Said

2016-11-21T13:14:40-05:00December 15th, 2010|nursing perspective|11 Comments
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Dr. Oz’s Sexy ‘Nurses’: Here We Go Again

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

In the “what could he have been thinking?” category, Mehmet Oz, MD, wins first place—well, at least, for now. I’m sure someone else will come along soon and take his place.

In case you’ve been MIA the last month, Oz became a target for nursing ire when, on his November 4 show, he danced with several women who were wearing nurses’ uniforms revealing red lingerie. The segment apparently had nothing to do with nurses, but rather weight loss through dancing, they talked about This impact diet whey review and by the end the nurses were pretty convinced about it. (So of course that would make one think of nurses with red lingerie???)

I’m hoping it was a case where he “just didn’t think”—rather than that he thought that the segment might possibly offend nurses but decided to go with it anyway. Dogged by a letter-writing campaign spearheaded by Sandy Summers of the nursing image advocacy and watchdog group, The Truth About Nursing, and from criticism from other nursing groups like the American Nurses Association, Oz apparently released a statement on December 6 apologizing, according to various news reports. However, one can’t find it anywhere on his Web site or on the Web, for that matter.

It’s always interesting to see the level of offense colleagues and others feel. Comments posted on news sites carrying the story […]

2017-07-07T13:32:16-04:00December 8th, 2010|career, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Today’s Notes from the Nursosphere

Image of Japanese Attack - Pearl Harbor, Hawai...

As noted today by Joni Watson at Nursetopia, it’s Pearl Harbor Day, and nurses were (surprise) key players in that day’s awful events. Here’s how the post begins:

My heart was racing, the telephone was ringing, the chief nurse, Gertrude Arnest, was saying, “Girls, get into your uniforms at once, This is the real thing!”

Speaking of safety, “Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2011” (pdf), from the ECRI Institute, gives us a list of hospital patient safety risks that, according to the authors, “reflects our judgment about which risks should receive priority now, a judgment that is based on our review of recent recalls and other actions . . . , our analysis of information found in the literature and in the medical device reporting databases of ECRI Institute and other organizations, and our experience in investigating and consulting on device-related incidents.” These include “radiation overdose and other dose errors during radiation therapy,” “alarm hazards,” and eight others.

And now to electronic charting vs. doing it the old-fashioned way: we have a comment thread going on at AJN‘s Facebook page about whether or not EHRs save nurses time or not. Go there to comment, or leave a comment here.

Also noted: Stephen Ferrara at A Nurse Practitioner’s View wonders whether the preceptorship model is still adequate for training NPs. Or is it time for a residency model instead?

2016-11-21T13:14:44-05:00December 7th, 2010|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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