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

Editor-in-chief, (emerita), AJN

Labor Day Déjà Vu – Nurses’ Views of Work, Then and Now

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr. Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr.

If you like nursing history, there’s a new blog called Echoes and Evidence by the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. (The first post draws on a 2005 AJN article on how nurses over 100 years ago responded to a series of typhoid epidemics in Philadelphia.)

Because AJN is over 100 years old (115 next year), it has a rich archive that I’ve been digging into recently (see my post from last week about an article Virginia Henderson wrote for AJN 50 years ago, and from late June, about nurses and D-Day).

So it seems especially fitting, just after Labor Day, to point to a January 1953 article by Sister Mary Barbara Ann, a former president of the Iowa Nurses Association (INA), which detailed findings from a survey of 223 general duty nurses in Iowa to learn their opinions of the hospitals in which they worked. I won’t present her exact findings here—we’ve made the article free until the end of September: just click through to the PDF. (Subscribers can always access the archives.) But here’s how she summarized what she learned:

“They [general duty nurses] are asking only for reasonable working conditions in which they can feel happy and secure. They are pleading for recognition and appreciation for what they are as persons and […]

2016-11-21T13:04:00-05:00September 2nd, 2014|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Revisiting Reality Shock – What’s Changed for New Nurses?

julie kertesz/ via flickr creative common julie kertesz/ via flickr creative common

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last month, we highlighted on Facebook a blog post I had written in 2010, “New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospital Settings – So What Else is New?” (It seemed timely in terms of all the June graduations.)

I wrote that original post in response to a study that had just been published in Nursing Outlook (here’s the abstract) describing the experiences of new nurses. Generally, these newbies felt harried, unprepared, overworked, and unsupported—all similar concerns voiced by nurses in Marlene Kramer’s 1974 book, Reality Shock: Why Nurses Leave Nursing. (Here’s AJN’s 1975 review of the book. It will be free for a month; note that you have to click the PDF link at the article landing page to read it.)

My post back in 2009 noted how nothing much seemed to have changed since the publication of Kramer’s book. Now, once again, this post has generated many comments, a number of them on our Facebook page as well as on the original blog post.

Here are a few. I’ll start with Facebook:

I’m almost a 20yr RN and have experienced [this] in a new job. I’ve developed skills to deal with this over the course of my career, so it doesn’t impact me like […]

2016-11-21T13:04:14-05:00July 28th, 2014|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, students|10 Comments
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As Another June Is Forgotten, Some Notes on Nurses and Normandy

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

A pause before the 4th of July: Nurses were at D-Day too.

NormandyNursesLanding Nurses coming ashore at Normandy/AJN archive

Last month, there were a number of D-Day remembrances in the media—June 6 was the 70th anniversary of the 1944 Allied forces landing along the beaches of Normandy and what many believe to have been the single largest tactical maneuver ever launched.

I was especially interested in the D-Day events—I’ll be visiting the Normandy beaches in October. My father was a World War II army veteran and landed at Normandy, though not in the first wave. He arrived days later with Patton’s 9th Armored Division after the beaches had been secured. (His unit would go on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and finally into Germany after securing the Bridge at Remagen, the only bridge across the Rhine River into Germany not destroyed during the German retreat.) ItalyNursesLanding AJN archive

One thing I was surprised to learn is that nurses landed at Normandy and other invasion beaches within only a few days of the first wave. The photos here are from the AJN archives—the above photo shows nurses landing at Normandy. And the one to the […]

2016-11-21T13:04:20-05:00July 3rd, 2014|career, nursing history|4 Comments
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Remembering Nurses Who Go Above and Beyond as Volunteers

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

A severely dehydrated patient receives iv fluids from Kari Jones, MD, as she is carried by a family member from triage to a tent at the Bercy CTC. Photo courtesy of Samaritan’s Purse. A severely dehydrated patient receives IV fluids from Kari Jones, MD, as she is carried by a family member from triage to a tent at the Bercy CTC. Photo courtesy of Samaritan’s Purse.

So another Nurses Week winds down and many nurses have been acknowledged for the fine work they do. But I think more recognition should be given to nurses who go above and beyond their usual nursing work and volunteer to help those in dire circumstances. This month in AJN, one of the two CE articles is called “Responding to the Cholera Epidemic in Haiti.” It details the work of one organization and its nurses. Here’s the overview:

While Haiti was still recovering from the January 12, 2010, magnitude-7 earthquake, an outbreak of cholera spread throughout the nation, soon reaching epidemic proportions. Working through the faith-based nongovernmental organization Samaritan’s Purse, an NP, an epidemiologist, and a physician joined the effort to prevent the spread of disease and treat those affected. Here they describe the prevention and intervention campaigns their organization initiated, how they prepared for each, and the essential elements of their operations.

The article provides essential information about such topics as setting up cholera treatment centers, assessment, rehydration priorities, prevention, enlisting […]

2018-03-28T10:25:15-04:00May 14th, 2014|nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Nurses Week: Time to Celebrate (Not Denigrate) Nursing’s Worth

shawnkennedyBy Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

So, on the cusp of Nurses Week, the week when Americans are encouraged to think about the value that nurses bring to health care, readers of the New York Times were treated to an op-ed written by physician Sandeep Jauhar. According to the byline, Jauhar is a cardiologist and the author of an upcoming memoir about his disillusionment as a physician. The title of the piece was “Nurses Are Not Doctors.” While the author makes sure to reassure us that he thinks nurse practitioners (NPs) have a valuable role to play in health care, he makes the usual charge that NPs are not qualified to practice primary care without physician supervision.

Jauhar conveniently ignores the many studies that have refuted this argument, while basing his case largely on weak anecdotes and one study from 1999 that showed NPs ordered more diagnostic tests. His conclusion: the NPs in the study ordered too many expensive tests because they lack the experience and knowledge of physicians (he concedes in passing that “there are many reasons the NPs may have ordered more tests”). I can’t help thinking that this piece’s publication was purposely timed to take some of the shine off Nurses Week.

I’m surprised that the Times published such a weak letter. First, […]

2018-03-28T10:24:54-04:00May 5th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|4 Comments
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