About Guest Author

This author has not yet filled in any details.
So far Guest Author has created 504 blog entries.

In Nursing, Empathy Is a Practice to Cultivate

Empathy as one reason nurses are so widely trusted.

Last December, nurses were named the most honest and trusted profession in the U.S. for the 17th year in a row. In order to build trusting nurse-patient relationships that can help improve health, nurses must understand the needs and circumstances of patients, families, and communities. One way nurses arrive at an understanding of these needs is through practicing empathy. This may explain why nurse empathy has been found to be a major factor in hospitalized patients’ satisfaction with their care.

photo credit: EKGTechnicianSalary

The word empathy is not very old, as words go. It appears to have been a translation into English, using a combination of Greek roots meaning ‘in’ and ‘feeling,’ of an early 20th century German psychological term, Einfűhlung (‘feeling-in’).

In health care, we generally define empathy as the ability to enter a patient’s frame of reference (thoughts, emotions, circumstances, etc.) and sense the meaning in her or his inner world, as the concept was described by Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology. 

Are we becoming less empathetic?

These days, empathy can often seem to be in short supply. Much-publicized study findings suggest that […]

2019-06-13T07:49:55-04:00June 13th, 2019|Nursing|1 Comment
Read More

Healing Words: A Critical Care Book Club

I was always a reader. The days of the Scholastic book fair during elementary school were among my favorites. Although it doesn’t appear in my CV, my first job was working in the school store. With every shift I worked, the smell of blank sheets of paper, the thrill of a pencil awaiting to be sharpened to that perfect point, or the ballpoint and ink pens in a rainbow of colors stole my hard-earned quarters.

‘Is it on the NCLEX?’

But reading novels during nursing school was just plain hard. There were competing priorities, a brain brimming with vital information, and sheer exhaustion at the end of the day. Assigned readings presented an overwhelming amount of contextual information. And then there was the constant attention to evidence, protocols, and clinical practice guidelines. The “need to know” information took priority; the sheer pleasure of losing oneself in a story—whether novel or memoir—was lost.

During my senior year, in an advanced illness course, my professors assigned a novel-style memoir, Bed Number Ten by Sue Baier. To this day, I can remember the reactions to the assignment: “A book? Who has time for that?” “Are we going to be tested on this book?”

Or, most importantly: “Is it on the NCLEX?”

The influence of a patient’s story on a […]

2019-05-29T08:45:40-04:00May 29th, 2019|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing stories|2 Comments
Read More

Nurses Recognizing the Importance of Earth Day

Happy Earth Day!

In the midst of this climate crisis it is important to take some moments to celebrate the earth. I like to do so by hiking in the Camden Hills on the coast of Maine. Over the last year, many cities and states have taken the lead in addressing climate change. I know this firsthand, as I serve as mayor of a small city in Maine. In the last year, our city has installed free public electric vehicle chargers, turned on our third solar array and are now powering almost 90% of our municipal electricity with solar, and created a city climate change committee to study the effects of climate on our community.

The most pressing public health challenge of this century.

As nurses we intimately know the communities that we serve and are aware of the potential physical and mental health effects of environmental factors. As the most trusted health profession, our voice is important in communication related to health and climate change.

As the nation moves towards a transition to renewable energy, nurses can join the conversation to ensure that all people are supported and included. Nurses know the importance of considering health in policy making. This includes ensuring that the communities who have been historically left out of environmental policy conversations […]

2019-04-22T08:22:51-04:00April 22nd, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments
Read More

Control: Ninety, and Still Haunted by a Husband’s Dying Promise

I will forever be haunted by the passing of Mrs. Haley. On the final days of her life, I was deemed her best, last support, because I knew something about the dangers of control. Or so I thought.

Work that changes you.

‘I will know, and you will pay’

One aspect of having a diverse occupational history within the mental health field is that you take something with you from every experience. However, there was one job that I wanted to walk away from clean, having taken nothing. Prior to becoming a nurse, I worked as an advocate for a domestic violence shelter. The position involved community education, outreach advocacy, supportive therapy, and violence prevention school programs. Those five years of my life were a relentless and eye-opening study of the dangers of control.

Domestic abuse or intimate partner violence is all about control, about an unhealthy balance of power in an intimate relationship. Advocates in the shelter provide a voice for the victims who suffer from domestic violence. Anyone can be vulnerable, regardless of gender or identification. According to the CDC, one in four women have experienced intimate partner violence (and one in nine men). Intimate partner violence remains a pervasive undercurrent in our culture, one still supported in […]

2019-04-05T09:50:54-04:00April 5th, 2019|Nursing|1 Comment
Read More

‘I Sorted, I Triaged’: Notes of an Emergency Nurse

Trauma and triage in the ED.

Ralph Hogaboom / Flickr

Today, I was assigned to be one of just two triage nurses in the emergency department (ED) waiting room. With a limited staff and nearly full department, our next wave of patients arrived. I collected health information from the patients, screened for domestic violence and suicidality, made a triage decision regarding acuity level, and assigned an ED destination based on bed availability and estimation of resources.

Then, a man was wheeled in, with a woman close behind screaming “a car ran over his legs!” I saw an open bleeding wound on his right lower leg. I brought him to the trauma room.

The woman said to me, “I don’t think I can walk anymore.” I asked her if the car hit her too, and she replied, “yes, the car hit me too.”

As a trauma nurse, I stayed to help the trauma staff with the simultaneous trauma cases. Then I went back to the waiting room.

I prioritized.

More patients arrived, seeking assistance for many different needs. Then my charge nurse came out and informed me that I was needed back in the trauma room to receive an incoming patient who had fallen down a 15-foot ravine. Nursing resources were reallocated as needed to meet the […]

2019-02-14T10:53:42-05:00February 14th, 2019|Nursing|2 Comments
Read More

Comment ground rules

1. Please be respectful.
2. We moderate all comments.

Content disclaimer

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.
Go to Top