By Jason Ford, via Flickr.
. . . and the PhD turns to her and says . . . (Sorry. That’s copyeditor humor—dangling modifiers and all that.)
My question for you is, should that nurse (let’s call her Beverly Smythe) be called Dr. Smythe? It’s an intriguing question, if only because it seems that some people think the answer is no. Diana Mason (PhD, RN, FAAN) mentioned this in her editorial last August. […]
Here’s a selection of sites and publications that AJN readers interested in narrative and poetry (particularly as it relates to health care) and in well-crafted writing might find worth a visit.
The Nieman Narrative Digest, a biweekly “compendium of narrative journalism” moderated by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, presents often unusual, always riveting stories. Health care–related pieces are regularly featured. One recent selection, “Fixing Mr. Fix-It” from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, describes the rehabilitation of a truck mechanic whose arms were severed in a terrible accident. […]
Nurses leaving for lunch break at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.
I get in a really bad mood when I’m hungry and can’t eat. According to the NY Times, I’m not alone. Before coming to AJN, I worked in a direct patient care setting and never seemed to find the time to eat, whether in the inpatient or outpatient areas. There was always something that needed to be done that couldn’t wait. […]
In October 2004 AJN published “The Fear Is Still in Me” by Kathleen McCullough-Zander and Sharyn Larson, an article detailing how nurses might identify, assess, and treat the approximately 400,000 to 500,000 survivors of torture now living in the U.S. (I was the editor). It’s not a subject most people like to think about, but there it is.
And now here it is again, according to a “long-secret” report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that was completed in 2007 and only recently published online by the New York Review of Books. Only this time, it’s health care personnel—a group that “should be understood to include physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and other para-health staff”—who allegedly participated in torture. No, they weren’t there to safeguard the victims. As an article about the report in Monday’s New York Times notes, the role of such professionals “was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners.”
Does it matter that those tortured were suspected of terrorism and were being held by the CIA overseas? Not to the International Council of Nurses, which has issued and twice revised a position statement that calls for nurses to actively oppose torture; I can find no exceptions named. Indeed, many nurses—including McCullough-Zander and Larson—have argued that the prevention of human rights abuses is itself a nursing responsibility. It’s an […]
We recently received the following account of a visit to Azerbaijan from AJN contributing editor Jane Salvage, MSc, BA, RGN. At the time of writing, Salvage was a consultant for the noncommunicable diseases programme, World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe. She now works as the policy lead in the support team for the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery in England, and fears that seeing Baku in the springtime will have to wait a year or two. This post is fairly long, but we feel the range of local detail included by Salvage gives a fascinating glimpse into what it’s really like to work in the field of international public health policy. (Note: we’ve retained some UK-style spellings.)