Blogging: As Many Voices as There Are Nurses

Blogging – What Jolly Fun/Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, via Flickr Creative Commons

A recent check reveals that a good percentage of the blogs on our nursing blogs list have been relatively active over the past few months. A few have been less so. I didn’t see any posts about the ice-bucket challenge, and that’s okay. Here are a few recent and semirecent posts by nurses that might interest readers of this blog:

Hospice nursing. At Hospice Diary, a post from a few weeks back is called “Dying with Your Boots On.” An excerpt:

As I drove down a switch-back gravel drive in the middle of nowhere, I pulled into a driveway and there in a sun-warmed grassy yard sitting perfectly still on a garden swing among buzzing bees and newly bloomed flowers was a fellow in a crisp white shirt, a matching white cowboy hat, black leather boots and a crooked smile.  I stepped out of my car and told him for a moment I thought he was the garden scarecrow, until he tipped his hat.

Nurse-midwifery. A post on At Your Cervix: Tales of a New CNM, First Year gives a short nuts-and-bolts glimpse of the author’s daily work life as a certified nurse-midwife. Those considering this specialty may benefit from one person’s experience of the pros and cons of one workplace:

I thought (as I was taught) that I would have more autonomy in practice . . . the two physicians are truly the “bosses.” Everything needs to be run by them . . . I definitely have more autonomy in the office setting. There was a big difference in reading/learning about prenatal care and GYN care, versus doing it. I didn’t learn (or have clinical experience in) nearly enough GYN clients! I think the number of GYN clients for clinicals was only about 35.

For the ‘research-minded nurse.’ At the INQRI blog—that is, the blog of the Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, which has a stated goal “to generate, disseminate and translate research to understand how nurses contribute to and can improve the quality of patient care”—you will find even-handed and brief summaries of recent nursing research on topics such as the potential for hourly nursing rounds to improve patient care.

Renewal. If you’re taking a vacation and going somewhere more peaceful this summer, sometime AJN blogger Amanda Anderson has a contemplative post, “The Place Where Noise Becomes Sound,” at her blog This Nurse Wonders. It starts like this:

Summer has finally found me. Somewhere in the long train ride west, between naps and riders and minutes of staring at passing trees, I listened.

For a raw, unfiltered voice from a veteran urban ER nurse, visit Madness: Tales an Emergency Room Nurse, where you will find a knowing, sometimes raunchy tone, gritty detail, flashes of wit, and strong opinions, as in a recent post on the glaring ironies of a well-funded hospital surrounded by urban poverty, among other topics. (Please note: just because we link to a blog doesn’t mean we endorse the opinions or language you may find there. For obvious reasons, AJN‘s Off the Charts takes a more measured tone. But this is social media, and it seems fair to acknowledge that nursing can be a tough profession and there are as many voices out there as there are nurses.)

Lastly, two of our perennial favorites among nurse bloggers are JParadisiRN, who sometimes writes for this blog, and Not Nurse Ratched, who has written the iNurse column (paywall) for AJN in recent years, addressing topics such as nurses and social media.