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

Editor-in-chief, (emerita), AJN

Nursing Conferences: A Vital Part of Professional Development

On missing nursing conferences during the pandemic.

Almost each year since it began, I would fly to wherever the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) was holding its annual National Teaching Institute (NTI). At first, I attended because I was a critical care nurse, working in the emergency shock trauma area of New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, and found the content invaluable. I had also joined the local chapter and knew others going to the meeting. I remember my first NTI in New Orleans—so many sessions, and meeting other nurses from around the country who were doing such amazing work gave me a sense of pride in my profession.

As my career progressed and I moved away from direct patient care into staff development, I would still attend to keep up with new information that I needed to incorporate into educational offerings. When I began working with AJN, first in CE and then as news director, I still attended to keep up to date and to network.

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted life and conferences—while virtual conferences at least offered content updates, they lacked the opportunity for personal networking that I find so important. This year there was an in-person NTI, but I opted not to attend because of the highly contagious COVID-19 variants in circulation.

But what I did do was what something that has become an AJN-AACN tradition—I interviewed the outgoing […]

2022-05-25T07:40:06-04:00May 24th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Should Medical Errors Result in Jail Time?

Image via PxHere

On March 25, Tennessee nurse RaDonda Vaught was convicted of criminally negligent homicide and negligent abuse of an impaired adult for a 2019 medication error that resulted in the death of a patient. We covered this story as it first unfolded three years ago. In fact, the most recent update on our blog, published in March 2019, reported that state health officials had considered the circumstances surrounding the error and declined to take any action.

Outrage from multiple nursing and health care organizations.

Subsequently, however, the Tennessee board of nursing revoked Vaught’s license and the decision was taken to charge her after all. In the past weeks, Vaught’s conviction has sent shock waves through the health care professional community, and many organizations have spoken against the verdict:

From the statement by the American Nurses Association:

“Health care delivery is highly complex. It is inevitable that mistakes will happen, and systems will fail. … The non-intentional acts of Individual nurses like RaDonda Vaught should not be criminalized to ensure patient safety.”

From the statement of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses:

“Decades of safety research, including the Institute of Medicine’s pioneering report To Err Is Human, has demonstrated […]

2022-04-07T10:34:01-04:00April 7th, 2022|Nursing, nursing career|1 Comment
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How Should a Nurse Support Patients in Choosing a Time to Die?

Two of my six aunts died from Alzheimer disease (AD). They didn’t live nearby, so when I saw them every few months, the deterioration from the illness was evident. Both showed the same behavioral trends: some mild forgetfulness and repetitive questioning at first, then what seemed a prolonged period of incessant questions and bewilderment and anxiety over not understanding where they were or why they were there, who others were. Wandering outside at all hours, agitation and resistance to hygiene, eventually disappearing into a nonverbal, nonresponsive state.

It was painful to watch these formerly active, smart, and vibrant women decline in such a way. The most painful part was when they still understood that they were becoming confused and how frightened that made them.

Now there are alternatives available for those who don’t want to go down that road—but they are hard to come by, especially if you live in the United States.

People with dementia face particularly high hurdles.

A special feature in the March issue, “Medical Aid in Dying: What Every Nurse Needs to Know,” covers medical aid in dying and the nurse’s appropriate role in many end-of-life circumstances, including the ethically and logistically challenging situations of those with dementia who seek some agency over how […]

2022-03-28T09:59:28-04:00March 28th, 2022|Ethics, Nursing, nursing roles, patient experience|0 Comments
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Securing Our Place in History: Nurses and Women’s History

Editor’s note: The text below is from the editorial by Shawn Kennedy published in the March 2015 issue of AJN, “Securing Our Place in History,” and the illustration is that month’s cover image. 

Henry Street Settlement Nurse, Lower East Side, New York City

In 1980, after realizing that women were largely missing from the history books, a group of women formed the National Women’s History Project.

They embarked on a campaign to “celebrate and recognize women’s role in history” and, in 1987, were successful in getting Congress to designate the month of March as Women’s History Month.

Each year, the NWHP chooses a theme and honors women who have made significant contributions to society yet have remained unknown.

The organization also provides educational materials and acts as a clearinghouse for multicultural women’s history information. This year’s theme, “Weaving the Stories of Women’s Lives,” reflects the NWHP’s tenet that “[k]nowing women’s achievements challenges stereotypes and upends social assumptions about who women are and what women can accomplish today.”

One might substitute the word nurses for women in this statement.

Most people still don’t understand all that nurses have done—and continue to do—to improve health care. Most would likely recognize the name of […]

2022-03-21T09:36:44-04:00March 21st, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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History Is What We Make It

February is Black History Month—officially observed as such by President Gerald Ford in 1976, America’s bicentennial year, to celebrate the contributions of Black Americans to our nation. It began as a week of remembrance established in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, founder and president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He chose the second week in February because it coincided with the birthdays of President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became a famous orator, author, and abolitionist. Later, in 1986, Congress designated the month of February as “National Black History Month.”

I didn’t know about the origins of Black History Month until I was preparing this editorial. This made me wonder about the many other things I wasn’t aware of concerning the history of Black Americans in this country. It wasn’t until last year, on its centennial, that I learned about the massacre that destroyed the Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. And it was only in the last few years that I learned about the Tuskegee syphilis study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 until 1972. (Yes, 1972!) In this study, originally known as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” participants with syphilis were […]

2022-02-09T14:26:55-05:00February 9th, 2022|Nursing|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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