Essential Nursing Resources: A Crucial Tool for Nurses Seeking Information on the Web

This nursing resource will help you find anything you need to know

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Back in the dark ages, before the Web, when I was in school and researching a topic, I would go to the university library (in Manhattan, this meant a subway ride to the main campus), fill out a form, and hand it to the librarian. After a couple of hours, I’d check back and the librarian would have pulled up to eight “on-reserve” books (no more were allowed until these were returned) from the stacks and have them waiting for me. This cycle would repeat itself several times, and sometimes I’d have to wait for an “ILL”—an interlibrary loan. Of course, if I procrastinated, the material I wanted might already have been taken out by other students and I’d be out of luck, facing a deadline with no source material.

Of course, it’s all different now with the Web. This week, even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica announced it is ceasing print production after almost 250 years and will only be available in digital format.

Now, researchers and students have virtually every article published available to them via the Internet. For nurses, there’s something called Essential Nursing Resources (pdf), an annotated listing of resources for nursing published by the Interagency Council on Information Resources in Nursing (ICIRN). 

Founded in 1960 (here’s a brief history) by […]

2016-11-21T13:10:20-05:00April 10th, 2012|digital health, nursing research|0 Comments
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“Let Patients Help”: Nurses and e-Patients

Joy Jacobson is a health care journalist and the poet-in-residence at the Center for Health, Media, and Policy at Hunter College, where she teaches writing to nursing students.

In the March issue of AJN, a letter writer responds critically to my news report, “Leveling the Research Field Through Social Media,” published last October. My report summarizes some recent trends in medical research, including patients using Facebook and other social networking sites to push for the funding of research into treatments that the science may not support. I go on to discuss PatientsLikeMe, which describes itself as “a health data-sharing platform” designed to “transform the way patients manage their own conditions.”

The letter writer objects to the idea of patients sharing their own data online. Can vulnerable, mentally ill patients, she asks, consent to participate in online research? Is enough being done to safeguard them? “I suggest we disseminate information to nurses that helps them steer patients away from Web sites such as PatientsLikeMe,” she concludes, “until programs and processes are in place to better protect the public we’ve pledged to serve.”

Several PatientsLikeMe researchers responded to this nurse’s points; a synopsis of their responses was included along with the reader’s letter in the March issue. “What we are doing is new and as such should be scrutinized frequently and rigorously by peers to ensure we are meeting the ethical standards one would expect for our patients,” they write. “We believe our […]

2016-11-21T13:10:25-05:00March 30th, 2012|digital health, healthcare social media, patient engagement, patient experience|3 Comments
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Kony 2012: A Real Villain, Plus a Few Questions

By Maureen ‘Shawn’ Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

Social media is once again proving its power to engage people around the world—this time, in the efforts to find and capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal militia group that waged a war of terror in Uganda for two decades and is now operating, in a diminished but still lethal capacity, in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan.

Kony was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005 based on his record of murder, torture, rape, and the enslavement of thousands of people, mostly women and children. At its height, his army was said to be comprised mostly of child soldiers—the children he abducted and forced to become killers, whose first victims were often their parents. Filmmakers with Invisible Children, a nonprofit organization dedicated to influencing change in Africa, created Kony 2012, a film that “went viral” last week and fuelled widespread support for a campaign to support efforts to capture Kony.

Kony and the atrocities of the LRA are not new “news.” AJN reported on the issue of child soldiers in Uganda and numerous other countries in 2005, when we profiled the work of nurses Susan McKay and […]

2016-11-21T13:10:31-05:00March 12th, 2012|healthcare social media|0 Comments
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Boards of Nursing and the Amanda Trujillo Case

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

Amanda Trujillo

Our prior post on the Amanda Trujillo case elicited many comments, on a variety of themes. There were also referrals and crosslinks to other sites supporting, analyzing, and weighing in on the situation, including statements from the Arizona Nurses Association and the ANA, and a post on a physician blog, “White Coat’s Call Room,” which has vowed to carry all the details once the case is decided.

One complaint raised by several people in response to our post was that the Arizona Board of Nursing wasn’t supporting Amanda. State nursing or medical boards are regulatory boards that exist to ensure the protection of the public and to regulate professional practice according to the law (in nursing’s case, according to nursing practice acts). They do not aim to protect the individual nurse, but to assure that all those who claim to be nurses are eligible to claim that title and practice within their scope of practice as defined by law.

Some historical context: Regulatory boards were set up back in the early 1900s, after nursing associations successfully lobbied for registration laws to keep out unqualified women who posed as nurses. In 1903, North Carolina was the first state to enact a nurse practice act; by the mid-1920s, all 48 states had laws regulating who could practice and who could use the title “registered nurse.”

Thus, boards of nursing are intended to protect the consumer and the […]

2016-11-21T13:10:42-05:00February 17th, 2012|Ethics, healthcare social media, Nursing|12 Comments
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Blogroll Housecleaning Note

"N-R-O-G super suds housecleaning week&qu...

This is just to say that we’ve done some minor housekeeping and deleted links to a number of blogs that have been asleep several months or longer. There’s nothing personal in this, and please let us know if one of these was yours and you’ve decided to revive your blog, give it an infusion of new design and energy, or the like. We want our blogroll to be useful, and it won’t be perceived as useful if we’re linking to sites that have gone dark. Please also let us know if there’s a really great nurse blog that we don’t know about, even if it’s yours. We can’t guarantee that we’ll link to it, but we’ll certainly check it out.—JM, blog editor

2016-11-21T13:10:44-05:00February 9th, 2012|healthcare social media|14 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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