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Column Spotlight: Learning to Be Strip Savvy When Reading ECGs

“In my experience, many nurses working outside of critical care haven’t had a lot of training in reading and understanding basic ECGs.”

Have you ever learned something new and thought to yourself, how did I miss this? Why didn’t I know about this sooner?

Now more than ever people are finding information by searching for it on their own. The days of reading a print journal cover to cover are, for the most part, behind us. Many readers find articles by searching for a specific topic of interest. While this approach can be useful, you risk missing out on all that rich content in a journal issue you didn’t know that you needed to know.

One of AJN’s great features is our broad coverage of nursing topics.

We intentionally put together each issue to bring nurses the information they need to stay on the top of their professional game. For this reason, I like to highlight our columns here every now and then. (See, for example, my spotlight on our Nursing Research, Step by Step column).

Another great column nurses might be missing out on is Strip Savvy, written by Nicole Kupchik and Joel Green. This month’s installment, “A Case of an Asymptomatic […]

2022-02-02T10:18:08-05:00February 2nd, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Nursing Resources: A Helpful Guide on Marijuana and Marijuana Products

As a psychiatric NP, I’m required to ask patients about the drugs they are currently taking, whether legally or illegally. This is important information to know regarding patients’ overall health, as well as for deciding which medication is safe to prescribe for them. With the recent changes in cannabis legalization, more and more patients who report using medical or recreational marijuana are being seen in health care environments.

More patients using cannabis products.

Staying knowledgeable of the effects, adverse effects, and potential interactions of marijuana is therefore critical for those of us caring for patients. Yet there isn’t much focus on marijuana education in the general training of health care professionals and cannabis is often not included in drug guidebooks. […]

2022-01-07T14:11:20-05:00January 7th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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How Can You Bear to Be a Nurse? A Classic Question Revisited

In 1987, Mary Mallison, editor of AJN, posed a provocative question in her editorial: “How can you bear to be a nurse?” She offered several questions that the public often asks nurses, and provided clever (and sometimes powerful) responses that nurses could use to correct the public’s misunderstanding. A few examples:

How can you be a nurse? How can you bear the sight of blood?
Wait until you slide a catheter into a tiny vein just before it collapses. The flashback of blood you see will make you sing.

How can you be a nurse? How can you bear the sight and smell of feces?
Wait until you’ve been anxious about the diarrhea that nothing has stopped in an AIDS patient. Finally, your strategies work and you see and smell normal stool. You’ll welcome that smell.

How can you be a nurse? So many of your patients are so old, so sick, these days. How can you bear the thought that, in the end, your care may make no difference?
Wait until you’ve used your hands and eyes and voice to dispel terror, to show a helpless person that his life is respected, that he has dignity. Your caring helps him care […]

2021-12-21T10:20:52-05:00December 21st, 2021|Nursing|2 Comments
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What Have We Learned About Preventing School Shootings?

On November 30, a 15-year-old sophomore at Oxford High School in Michigan killed four students and injured seven others. Both the student and his parents are presently incarcerated and charged with numerous crimes.

In the days following this tragic event, questions arose regarding what the parents and school might have done to prevent this from happening. The parents are facing charges of involuntary manslaughter and a federal lawsuit, perhaps the first of others to follow, has been filed against the school district alleging that more could have and should have been done.

Warning signs and preventive actions.

With each school shooting we again find ourselves asking ourselves what can be learned in terms of warning signs and actions that could be taken. The September Mental Health Matters column in AJN, which I co-authored with Arlene Holmes—whose son James was responsible for the mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012—highlighted warning signs that might indicate potential violence by someone experiencing mental health problems.

What can be learned from the events that unfolded in Oxford that could be applied to a similar scenario, perhaps heading off another tragedy? The following checklist compiled by Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate youth to prevent gun […]

2021-12-15T11:43:26-05:00December 15th, 2021|mental illness, Nursing|0 Comments
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Therapeutic Humor in Nursing: More Important Than Ever

Nursing during a pandemic is no laughing matter…but it was for me.

Photo by Mathias Konrath on Unsplash

Assessing mental health patients over the phone at the VA was always challenging. I worked with the primary care providers, assessing new patients and getting them the right mental health resources.

Little did I know it was going to be taken to another level during the pandemic. It was Covid mental health mayhem: Covid cold calls, suicidal calls, PTSD patients plummeting with increased isolation and hospitalizations. There was increased depression, anxiety, and insomnia (and that was just the RN staff members, LOL!).

I couldn’t control this pandemic, my frustration over anti-vaxxers, the fatigue, fears, or sadness. But what I realized I could control was my daily interactions with the patients. I had to do review the PHQ-9 questionnaire for major depression symptoms and the GAD for anxiety. Once I’d finished the mental health assessments, I’d concentrate on the behavioral activation their results suggested.

Cultivating patient connection through laughter.

Having taken part in research on the therapeutic benefits of humor, one strategy I often used with these patients was to ask them, “What made you laugh today?”

At first, many couldn’t think of anything. So I decided to ask about more specific subjects […]

2021-12-01T08:29:30-05:00December 1st, 2021|Nursing|2 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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