Nursing Blogs Roundup: Some Veteran Voices and Some Lively New Ones

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

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

Here are some new or newish posts of note on various nursing blogs:

At Nursetopia: “You Get What You Put In To Your Nursing Association.”

At Nursing Stories: “Memories of MICU,” a post about visiting a new state-of-the-art medical intensive care unit (MICU) and comparing it to one the author worked on in the 1970s.

At the American Nurses Association (ANA) blog called One Strong Voice: “Working With a New Graduate or Novice RN? If So, Be Mindful of Workplace Bullying.”

Episode six is now up at The Adventures of Nurse Niki, a newish blog written by Julianna Paradisi (her other blog is JParadisi RN). This blog is made up entirely of first-person episodes told by a fictional nurse named Niki. Each episode is short, detailed, and engaging, and it’s easy to keep up with it on a regular basis, or quickly catch up if you haven’t yet read any episodes.

At Digital Doorway: “Evolving as a Nurse: The Work of the Soul.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

“The evolution of a nurse and […]

2016-11-21T13:06:50-05:00August 5th, 2013|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Friday Nursing Blogs Roundup, More or Less

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

BostonAnother Friday in New York, and it’s time to do a quick tour of the nursing blogosphere after a grueling week in which the city I will always think of as home, Boston, took a major hit on a holiday that always marks the end of a long winter, the first stirrings of spring, the Red Sox playing in the morning, no one at work, glimpses of marathoners passing in the distance up still salt-stained avenues under barely budding trees, usually in bright sun and a gusty breeze with an underside of chill.

I have noted ad nauseam in the past that blogs have life cycles, wax and wane, flourish or fade out. And that’s okay. Though maybe blogs should go to a blog graveyard at some point, or be given a proper burial, or demolished like old buildings in a great controlled cinematic whoosh of collapsing pixels and pixel-dust. Or, in some cases, put in a museum to mark a moment in Web history or preserve particularly lively voices and experiences for posterity.

Enough throat clearing. There isn’t much out there to report this week. We try to collect links to sane, more or less active blogs on our nursing blogs page. A few nurse bloggers are perennially engaging and active, and a couple of these excellent bloggers even write occasional posts for this blog, so for once I won’t draw attention to them. […]

2016-11-21T13:07:49-05:00April 19th, 2013|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Some Recent Notable Posts from Nursing Blogs

Some posts of interest from the nursing blogs (those that are currently active; a fair number of familiar bloggers seem to be taking breaks, having kids, starting new jobs):

“Certified Medical Assistants Calling Themselves Nurses” can be found at The Nurse Practitioner’s Place. It’s not just inaccurate to do so, says the author. It’s often illegal.

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

At My Strong Medicine, a short post about men, women, USPSTF guidelines, becoming an NP, and reaching a certain age, called “Heard While Studying: Everything Falls Apart at Age 40.”

One blogger, among others, who has been pretty quiet for some months (and who used to organize a regular “blog carnival” that helped create a community among nurse bloggers) is Kim McCallister at Emergiblog. She popped back up several weeks ago with a post called “The Voice,” which is about exactly that—how a nurse blogger lost the sense of freedom she started with as a staff nurse jotting down experiences, and instead internalized a “Sister Superego” that cautioned her to be “prim and proper,” rapping her knuckles until she just fell silent instead. Frustration with computerized charting and the general state of health care seems to be part of it as well. We hope the spirit moves her to write more soon.

Lastly, there’s a nice post by Megen Duffy (who often writes AJN‘s iNurse column, and who […]

2016-11-21T13:08:29-05:00January 25th, 2013|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Health Technology Hazards: ECRI’s Top 10 for 2013

hazard/jasleen kaur, via Flickr hazard/jasleen kaur, via Flickr

It’s a new year and with it comes new health care technology hazards to keep in mind, as listed in the most recent ECRI Institute report, 2013 Top 10 Heath Technology Hazards. While some risks from last year’s list made a repeat appearance, a few new topics made the cut for 2013.

Alarm hazards still posed the greatest risk, topping the list at number one. Other repeat hazards included medication administration errors while using smart pumps, unnecessary radiation exposure, and surgical fires. For an overview on these, see our post from last year.

Several new opportunities for harm seemed to involve new information technology (IT) that is making its way into health care facilities, such as smartphones and mobile devices. Here’s a snapshot of several of these, and some suggestions the report gives on how to prevent them.

Patient/data mismatches in electronic health records (EHRs) and other health IT systems

The risk: One patient’s records ending up in another patient’s file may not be a new phenomenon—it happened in traditional paper-based systems as well. But newer, more powerful health IT systems have the capability to transmit mistaken data to a variety of devices and systems, multiplying the adverse effects that could result from these errors.

Some suggestions: The report suggests that when purchasing health IT systems, facilities should consider how all the connected technologies facilitate placing the right patient data into the right record. […]

2016-11-21T13:08:37-05:00January 4th, 2013|digital health, Nursing|1 Comment
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Top 10 New AJN Posts of 2012

British Nurse and Baby, via Flickr/jdlasica British Nurse and Baby, via Flickr/jdlasica

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

Maybe, who knows, some social media content isn’t really quite as ephemeral as we usually believe. Some of our posts seem to keep finding readers, like 2009’s “New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospitals–So What Else Is New?” They’re still relevant and timely, addressing as they do some of the more perennial topics in nursing.

Our 20 most-read posts for the year include several others that aren’t “new” this year: “Parting Thoughts: 10 Lessons Learned from Florence Nightingale’s Life”; “Confused About the Charge Nurse Role? You’re Not Alone”; “‘Go Home, Stay, Good Nurse’: Hospital Staffing Practices Suck the Life Out of Nurses”; “Is the Florence Nightingale Pledge in Need of a Makeover?”; “Do Male Nurses Face Reverse Sexism?”; “Fecal Impaction and Dementia: Knowing What to Look for Could Save Lives”; “Are Nursing Strikes Ethical? New Research Raises the Stakes”; and “One Take on the Top 10 Issues Facing Nursing.”

The upstarts. Putting aside posts that have shown a certain longevity, here are the top 10 new posts of 2012, according to our readers, in case you missed them along the way. Are they our best posts of 2012? We will leave that to you. Thanks to everyone who wrote, read, and commented on this blog over the past year.

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2016-11-21T13:08:45-05:00December 12th, 2012|healthcare social media|0 Comments
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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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