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Does Telephone Follow-up After Myocardial Revascularization Help?

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Cellphone macro by Cubosh, via Flickr

Myocardial revascularization, an established treatment for coronary heart disease, is currently done via either percutaneous coronary intervention or coronary artery bypass graft surgery. But recovery and rehabilitation can be hard going, and patients need close monitoring. Investigators Rejane K. Furuya and colleagues wanted to learn more about the use of telephone follow-up with such patients. To that end, they searched the literature, identified relevant studies, and assessed and synthesized the results. In this month’s original research CE, “Telephone Follow-Up for Patients After Myocardial Revascularization: A Systematic Review,” they report on their findings. Here’s a short summary.

The review was conducted in accordance with the Cochrane method. The researchers searched six electronic databases for articles on clinical trials that studied patients after myocardial revascularization using telephone follow-up and were published in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Of 170 identified studies, seven met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed.

Some findings. Both the purposes and contents of telephone follow-up varied in the analyzed studies. The researchers found that the contents could be grouped into four themes—cardiovascular illness; postoperative complications; self-care, including behavioral and lifestyle changes; and psychosocial evaluation and emotional support. Outcome measures also varied widely, but included health-related quality of life, pain, enrollment in cardiac rehabilitation programs, physical functioning, hospital readmission, mood symptoms, and medication compliance. Telephone follow-up was found to be “an effective intervention for most of the outcomes assessed.”

The […]

2017-07-27T14:51:19-04:00May 3rd, 2013|nursing research|1 Comment
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A Chorus of Bravo! and Huzzah! for these ‘Art of Nursing’ Contributors

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Albuquerque Moon from Two Albuquerque Moons, (c) Charles Kaiman 2007

The digital grapevine has brought news from several Art of Nursing contributors, and it makes me happy to pass it along. If you’re not already familiar with AJN’s Art of Nursing page, it’s a regular monthly department that features poetry, “flash” fiction, and visual art. Visit our Web site and have a look! (Art of Nursing is always free; please click through to the PDFs for the best view.)

Bernadette Geyer’s first full-length collection of poetry, The Scabbard of Her Throat, was published last month by The Word Works. It was selected for publication under the Hilary Tham Capital Collection imprint by Cornelius Eady. Geyer also has a poem in the second volume of the anthology The Waiting Room Reader: Words to Keep You Company, edited by Rachel Hadas and published in February by CavanKerry Press. Geyer, whose poem “Lessons” was featured in Art of Nursing (May 2010), works as a copy editor in the Washington, DC, area.

Charles Kaiman had a one-person show of his paintings in February and March at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City, his 15th solo show. For a virtual peek, visit the gallery’s web site. Kaiman’s art has appeared numerous times in our pages, most recently “Candlelight Self-Portrait” (September 2011) and “Lemon and Honey” (September 2009). Kaiman works as a clinical nurse specialist […]

2016-11-21T13:07:57-05:00April 3rd, 2013|Nursing|1 Comment
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The Seven Surprises: What I’ve Learned About Nursing Through Yoga

By Medora McGinnis, RN, whose last post for this blog was “Practically a Nurse: Life as a New Graduate RN.” Medora is now a pediatric RN at St. Mary’s Hospital in the Bon Secours Health System, Richmond, Virginia, as well as a freelance writer. As a nursing student she was the Imprint Editor for the National Student Nurses Association.

By HealthZone (The Star) [FAL], via Wikimedia Commons Hot Yoga (Bikram), by HealthZone (The Star), via Wikimedia Commons The room is dark, and hot; 105 degrees, to be exact. I carry my mat, towel, and water bottle to the back corner of the room and settle into my space. I drink some water and lie down, trying to let go of all of the thoughts racing around in my head. A few minutes later, class starts and we start breathing, moving, stretching, and sweating . . . and really sweating. I’m shaking as I try to hold my plank position (which I still have to modify on my knees), then relaxing into a forward bend. Breathing, drinking water, moving, and stretching—and without realizing it, my thoughts are only about the present moment.

When I decided to try hot yoga about a month ago, I knew it would help me reduce stress and gain flexibility, and I was even hoping I’d lose weight. As a present day RN and a former ballet dancer, I looked forward to some of the health benefits I’d heard […]

2021-06-17T15:01:35-04:00March 21st, 2013|nursing perspective, personal health practices|4 Comments
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Gel and a Poster: A Hand Hygiene Campaign Gets Tested in Two Outpatient Clinics

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

hand.sochacki.98193355_eb8473c967 Hand by sochacki.info, via Flickr

The trouble with hands is that they get into everything, and rapidly move between mouths, noses, eyes, and other people’s hands.

So says David Owen in his recent New Yorker article “Hands Across America,” which describes the development of the first gel sanitizer—and of course it’s nothing nurses and other clinicians don’t already know, just as they know that the practice of hand hygiene is crucial to reducing health care–associated infection rates. Yet adherence to hand hygiene guidelines among health care workers remains low. Interventions to improve hand hygiene have been tested in hospitals with demonstrated success, but have seldom been evaluated in other settings. In this month’s CE–Original Research feature, authors Kate Stenske KuKanich and colleagues describe their evaluation of a hand hygiene campaign in an outpatient oncology clinic and an outpatient gastrointestinal (GI) clinic.

The intervention. At each clinic, the researchers observed health care workers for the frequency of hand hygiene (attempts versus opportunities). After compiling baseline data, they initiated an intervention, which consisted of introducing an alcohol-based gel sanitizer and an informational poster to each clinic. (The gel sanitizer was provided as an alternative to foam sanitizer and soap and water.) One week later, interventional data were collected for five nonconsecutive days. Afterwards the posters and gel sanitizers were removed, and one month later, follow-up data were collected. Lastly, three months after follow-up observations ended, workers at […]

2017-07-27T14:51:38-04:00March 11th, 2013|nursing research|1 Comment
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International Women’s Day: Remembering Lives Shadowed by Violence

DSC_0028 Photo by Karen Roush

By Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

She lived in a trailer with her boyfriend and her three children, all under the age of five. He beat her up regularly.

Every few weeks she came in to see me at the health center where I worked as an NP in urgent care. Sometimes she would come in with bruises, but most of the time it was for the less obvious sequelae of violence—unexplained chest pain, palpitations, anxiety attacks, back pain, relentless headaches. There was a policy in urgent care that you couldn’t ask for a particular provider. So she would call to speak to me directly and when the operator put her through she’d know I was on and would come in.

I’m not sure why she came to trust me over the other providers. Maybe she could sense that I understood and didn’t judge her, though I had never told her about my own history of domestic violence. But it was probably because I listened. There was not much else I could do. She had gone to a counselor when I encouraged her to, but that didn’t last long—it was hard for her to find transportation for the 30-minute trip into town. I […]

2016-11-21T13:08:10-05:00March 8th, 2013|nursing perspective|3 Comments
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