Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor, Author at Off the Charts

Scutari: A Blog Post Will Never Do Justice To This Visit

This is the second to last in a series of posts by Susan Hassmiller, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, that chronicle her summer vacation spent retracing Florence Nightingale’s influential career.

Scutari was a “tragedy of epic proportions of which bureaucratic muddle and sheer human incompetence played the larger part, thrown in with a measure of bad luck.”

–Mark Bostridge, from his book, Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon

The Hospital: What Florence Experienced
It is almost incongruent that a woman who wrote more than 14,000 letters and 200 books said upon arriving at Scutari Hospital, a converted army barracks, that she was without words to describe what she saw. Of course, as time caught up with her, the words flowed quite freely. Death and mutilation surrounded her in this well-known deathtrap. Her nurses slept (“in catnaps”) in cramped quarters. Men were cramped into rooms and spilled out into the long corridors as they lay on straw beds on cold stone floors. Attendants had to walk over the men who were, by Nightingale’s command, a requisite 18 inches apart. More men died than lived.

Nightingale hardly slept, took her meals by the spoonful, and spent most of her time caring for the men, overseeing the band […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:16:28-05:00July 22nd, 2010|nursing research|4 Comments

Florence Comes to Constantinople…And I Come to Istanbul

By Sue Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing (from an ongoing series of posts by Hassmiller, who’s spending her summer vacation retracing crucial steps in Florence Nightingale’s innovative career)

As I enter the city of Istanbul today, I am tired. Almost immediately I catch myself and remember that it took me just 3.5 hours to fly from London to Istanbul and it took Ms. Nightingale almost a month to sail here (Istanbul was called Constantinople at the time). She was sick most of the time, but resolute in her mission. I look around at the airport and see that all I come into contact with are standing upright, while those Nightingale came into contact with were mostly horizontal. […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:16:30-05:00July 21st, 2010|Nursing|1 Comment

Embley Park: Where It All Began

By Sue Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN (5th in a series of posts by Hassmiller, who’s spending her summer vacation retracing crucial steps in Florence Nightingale’s innovative career)

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would ever be at the home of Florence Nightingale. But here I am, not only visiting her family’s estate, Embley Park, but sleeping here for the next four days. […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:16:42-05:00July 14th, 2010|career, nursing perspective|5 Comments

Reading this Blog Post May Lead to Blinking

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

“VA Hospital May Have Infected 1,800 Veterans With HIV”

I came across this headline when I was looking for the latest news on the Internet. It certainly got my attention. I immediately thought to myself, “Wow, haven’t these soldiers been through enough, and now they might have HIV.” I took the bait and did what the editors of the article hoped I’d do—I clicked on the headline. Sure enough, it was not exactly accurate. Yes, there was a risk that these patients had been exposed to bloodborne pathogens due to the improper cleaning technique performed on dental instruments at a VA hospital, but there was no specific reason to think they actually had that illness. It reminds me of a cautionary tale by Peter Jacobi I came across a number of years ago that demonstrates how statistics can be manipulated by writers: “100% of those who were born in 1850 and ate carrots are now dead. So carrots obviously lead to . . . death.”

While there are worse ones out there, this is an example of how headlines are manipulated to get readers’ attention. Don’t get me wrong: proper cleaning of instruments is an integral part of patient safety and all patients should be able to trust the facility providing them treatment. But wouldn’t it be more responsible to say, “VA hospital may have exposed 1,800 veterans to infection,” since we don’t […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:16:52-05:00July 7th, 2010|Nursing|0 Comments

Requiem for New York’s St. Vincent’s Hospital

A community in mourning leaves its messages

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editorial director/interim editor-in-chief

Each day, Alison Bulman walks by the closed doors of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village on her way to work as the senior editorial coordinator at the American Journal of Nursing. She has watched the number of testimonies left on the doors boarded up in April grow, as former patients leave messages of gratitude, anger, and sorrow for the loss of this 160-year-old institution. Alison thought they were worth sharing, and we agreed. So she took a great series of photos, which we’ve now collected in AJN‘s Flickr stream.

My first news story for AJN was about four nurses who worked at St.Vincent’s and who died while vacationing together. And in AJN’s first issue after September 11, 2001, we wrote about St.Vincent’s major role in treating victims and first responders after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

As a New Yorker and a nurse, I share the sense of loss felt for this venerable institution—not as much for its past as for the loss of a major health care center in a community that depended on it for access to care. The closing of the emergency department has already had repercussions: the Wall Street Journal reported on June 17 that ER visits in the surrounding hospitals were up. And midwives who practiced at St. Vincent’s were left in the lurch without physician back-up agreements […]