About Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)

Editor-in-chief, (emerita), AJN

Approaching Ostomy Care with Confidence

A first experience of as a nursing student.

I encountered my first stoma as a nursing student and the incident is seared into my memory. It was in the first semester of my medical–surgical nursing course. The patient was a middle-aged man three or four days post-op after a colon resection. I was very nervous, but figured my instructor would know what to do. My stomach dropped when she confessed that she was not all that familiar with stoma care but was confident we’d figure it out with some help from the staff.

Fortunately, the head nurse of the surgical ward (I’m dating myself: yes, it was a ward and yes, her title was head nurse, not nurse manager or patient care coordinator) was very experienced with new ostomy care. She helped both of us gather the correct supplies and briefed us on what to assess and do. We were able to competently change dressings, change the ostomy appliance, and make the patient comfortable. However, I don’t think I encountered another patient with an ostomy until a few years later. By then my knowledge had faded. I had to seek a refresher.

Stoma assessment and common complications.

Photo by Amelie-Benoist / BSIP / Alamy.

I am very pleased […]

2019-06-11T11:56:29-04:00June 11th, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments
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AACN: Going Strong After 50 Years

Once again, the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) proves it knows how to host a gathering—especially when it’s celebrating its own birthday.

Around a kitchen table in Nashville.

It was in 1969 that nurse Norma Shephard invited several nurses to a meeting; sitting around her kitchen table in Nashville, Tennessee, they formed what has become one of the largest and most successful nursing specialty organizations in the world. Five years later, in 1974, the AACN held its first annual National Teaching Institute (NTI) in New Orleans (I was there!). Today, the AACN numbers over 200 chapters and 100,000 members.

Its annual May NTI meeting is one of the largest nursing meetings, and this year’s meeting in Orlando was no different, with about 8,000 attendees, 200 educational sessions, and 400-plus exhibitors of products, educational and health care organizations, and recruiters. It takes about two days to really “do” the NTI exhibit hall.

From ‘nursing as hospital expense to nursing as investment.’

“Our Voice Our Strength” was the theme chosen by […]

2019-06-06T12:11:05-04:00June 6th, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments
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When Children Hurt

As an ER nurse, I saw a lot of people in pain, either arriving at our door to have their pain relieved or enduring the pain of needed treatments, knowing that the interventions were necessary. In my experience, though, there’s nothing worse than seeing a child in pain, and the younger the child, the more awful it was.

You began the encounter with a sick or injured child who was already frightened by the circumstances that had caused their parents or guardians to bring them to the hospital. It’s hard to get past the frightened eyes and tears, the little ones trying to burrow into their mother’s shoulder and not wanting to be put down on a paper-covered table. And this was before even attempting any assessment.

Nurse uses Wong–Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale to help assess patient’s pain. Photo by Gerry Melendez/The State/MCT via Getty Images.

Factors to consider in assessing a child’s pain.

We were taught that “pain is what the patient says it is,” and that still seems to be true of children’s reports of pain. But there are many factors that need to be considered, […]

2019-05-23T10:18:37-04:00May 23rd, 2019|Nursing, patient experience, Patients|0 Comments
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Nurses Week: A Time to Reflect on the Incredible Work Nurses Do

The Nurses Week theme this year as set by the ANA, “4 Million Reasons to Celebrate,” points to our numbers. I appreciate the concept, but I’m not in love with this theme—I don’t think our numbers are what make us worth celebrating.

What really matters.

What we should celebrate is nurses’ continued commitment, day after day, to making people’s lives better. Sometimes, that takes effort that goes above and beyond. That’s the focus of my May editorial, “The Unwavering Courage of Nurses.” It’s also depicted in the May issue cover photo (for background, read “On the Cover“): nurses literally running for their lives and the lives of their patient, just ahead of flames from the deadliest fire in California’s history. And it’s what makes some Red Cross nurses so special: see this article by Debby Dailey and Linda MacIntyre (listen to the podcast of my conversation with the authors, too).

I think Nurses Week is important, not so much for the public who, judging by their votes in the most recent Gallup poll, already think highly of us […]

2019-05-03T08:39:55-04:00May 3rd, 2019|Nursing, nursing career|0 Comments
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Revisiting Evidence-Based Practice, and ‘Making Change Stick’

Do you ever wonder why nurses engage in practices that aren’t supported by evidence, while not implementing practices substantiated by a lot of evidence? In the past, nurses changed hospitalized patients’ IV dressings daily, even though no solid evidence supported this practice. When clinical trials finally explored how often to change IV dressings, results indicated that daily changes led to higher rates of phlebitis than did less frequent changes.

That’s the beginning of the first article in our first “step by step” series, Evidence-Based Practice, Step by Step, launched in November 2009. It won the Nursing Print Media Award for Nursing Excellence from Sigma Theta Tau International; the 12 articles in the series continue to be among the most highly viewed of any AJN articles online.

Nurses know about EBP, but changing practice is another thing.

The continued popularity of the articles made us wonder if the tenets of EBP were still not adequately known by nurses. So we asked the experts, and the result is our new series, EBP 2.0: Implementing and Sustaining Change.

Sharon Tucker, PhD, RN, FAAN, and Lynn Gallagher-Ford, PhD, RN, NE-BC, DPFNAP, FAAN, both  at the Helene Fuld Health Trust National Institute for Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing and Healthcare at the Ohio State […]

2019-04-17T08:43:00-04:00April 17th, 2019|Nursing, nursing research|1 Comment
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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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