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Earth Day 2016: A Call for Less Toxic Homes, Safer Health Care Facilities

By Barbara Polivka, PhD, RN, professor and Shirley B. Powers Endowed Chair of Nursing Research, University of Louisville, Kentucky

EarthNASAAs we celebrate the 46th Earth Day, it’s good to look back.

  • Earth Day was founded by U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson and started as a national environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970. An estimated 20 million Americans gathered that day at sites across the nation.
  • An important result of the enormous public response to the first Earth Day celebration was the subsequent creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act.
  • Earth Day became an international celebration in 1971 when the UN Secretary General talked about it at a Peace Bell Ceremony in New York City.

Earth Day is a time to think about how we affect the environment and how we are affected by the environment.

Health Care Without Harm is an international organization promoting environmental health and justice. If you aren’t familiar with Health Care Without Harm I urge you to go to their web site to see how health care organizations are decreasing their environmental impact. Health care facilities are taking the following steps:

2016-11-21T13:01:17-05:00April 22nd, 2016|Ethics, Nursing|0 Comments
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‘Do You Consider Yourself Healthy?’ Study Sheds Light on RNs’ Lifestyle Practices

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Over the past decade, the lifestyle practices of nurses and their connection to quality of care and patient outcomes have been gaining attention. Indeed, according to the patient-centered, relationship-based care model, one of the main conditions for optimal care is that providers engage in healthy self-care behaviors. Yet there is some evidence suggesting that RNs don’t consistently do so, especially when it comes to exercise and stress reduction—even when they believe they should.

Nurse researchers Karen Thacker and colleagues recently conducted a study to learn more. They report their findings in this month’s CE–Original Research feature, “An Investigation into the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Practices of RNs.” Here’s a brief summary:

Purpose: To gather baseline data on the health-promoting lifestyle practices of RNs working in six major health care and educational institutions in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Methods: The 52-item Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II instrument was used to explore participants’ self-reported health-promoting behaviors and measure six dimensions: health responsibility, physical activity, nutrition, interpersonal relations, spiritual growth, and stress management.
Results: Findings revealed that physical activity and stress management scores were low for the entire group of RNs. There were statistically significant differences between nurses 50 years of age and older and those 30 to 39 years of age for the subscales of health responsibility, nutrition, and stress management, suggesting that older nurses are more concerned about […]

2016-11-21T13:01:18-05:00April 15th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research, personal health practices|0 Comments
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‘Join Now!’: Jane Delano, Early 20th Century Red Cross Nurse Pioneer

Jane Delano Jane Delano

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

In 1909, Jane Delano was chair of the national committee of the Red Cross nursing services, superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps, and president of the young American Nurses Association. The Red Cross was to serve as the reserve for nurses for relief services and for the army and navy nursing services. Flickr/ via James Vaughan Flickr/ via James Vaughan

At the outbreak of World War I, Delano mounted an aggressive national campaign to recruit thousands of nurses to attend to the troops in Europe and to provide services here at home during disasters and the 1918 influenza epidemic. AJN published a short biography of this remarkable woman in August 1930.

Delano also wrote a monthly column for the fledgling American Journal of Nursing. Her first column, a summary of the national meeting of the Red Cross in New York City, appeared in May 1909. Delano also founded the Red Cross Town and Country Nursing Service, which provided visiting nurses in rural areas. She died in France in 1919 while on Red Cross business.

Editor’s note: this is the second short post in a series we are publishing during Women’s History Month to draw attention to important figures or trends in the history of women and nursing. The first was “Parallel Developments: Women’s History and the Professional […]

2016-11-21T13:01:23-05:00March 18th, 2016|nursing history|0 Comments
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‘Less Codes, Less Death’: A Study Explores Nurses’ Perceptions of the Benefits of Rapid Response Teams

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

For any given health care program, staff perceptions about how well it works will affect its use and maintenance. This is the case with regard to rapid response teams (RRTs). Nurse leaders’ perceptions of the benefits of RRT teams will influence their sup­port for these teams; and the perceptions of RRT members and end users similarly will influence use. Yet little is known regarding such perceptions.

Semistructured Interview GuideNurse researcher Deonni Stolldorf recently conducted a study to learn more. She reports on her findings in one of this month’s Original Research features, “The Benefits of Rapid Response Teams: Exploring Perceptions of Nurse Leaders, Team Members, and End Users.” Here’s a brief summary:

Objective: This study sought to explore and compare the perceptions of nurse leaders, RRT members, and RRT users regarding the benefits of RRTs.
Methods: A qualitative, multiple-case study design was used. Semistructured interviews were con­ducted with nurse leaders, RRT members, and RRT users at four community hospitals, as part of a larger mixed-methods study examining RRT sustainability.
Results: All participants reported perceiving various ways that RRTs benefit the organization, staff mem­bers, and patients. Variations in the benefits perceived were observed between the three participant groups. Nurse leaders’ perceptions tended to focus on macro-level benefits. RRT members emphasized the teaching and learning opportunities that RRTs offer. RRT users […]

2016-11-21T13:01:24-05:00March 4th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|3 Comments
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The Bigger Picture: A New Nurse Embraces Her Ability to Still Ask ‘Why?’

Sarah Szulecki, BSN, RN, is a telemetry nurse at a hospital in New York State.

karen eliot/flickr karen eliot/flickr

As a new graduate nurse, I’ve found that adjusting to the microcosm of the hospital floor—its SBAR reports detailing a ‘here and now,’ its constant exchange of admissions and discharges, its wide spectrum of emotional extremes—has been challenging.

The experienced nurses on my telemetry floor tell me that it generally takes about one full year to start feeling as though you know what you’re doing. In the meantime, I find myself catching glimpses of scenes I hope I’ll someday be able to handle with grace—rather than with my current bumbling clumsiness.

A patient’s granddaughter is escorted into the hallway as staff flocks to her grandmother’s code blue, and I think of all the wrong things to say as she starts to cry.

As I examine his excoriated skin, a depressed patient looks humiliated and struggles to tell me that his home is infested with bedbugs—in my gut, I feel a grim helplessness about his future when he’s discharged a few days later.

A patient who has a sky-high hemoglobin A1c level admits that he has neither the desire nor the money to care for his diabetes. My pleas for change sound childish and naive to even my own ears.

These first few months of being a nurse amalgamate feelings of failure and […]

2016-11-21T13:01:26-05:00February 17th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|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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