Top 10 (New) AJN Posts of 2011

Some of our posts, like this one from 2009 (“New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospitals–So What Else Is New?”) keep getting found and read. They remain as relevant today as they were when we posted them. Our top 20 posts for the year (according to reader hits, that is) include several others like this: “What Is Meaningful Use? One Savvy Nurse’s Take”; “Is the Florence Nightingale Pledge in Need of a Makeover?”; “Do Male Nurses Face Reverse Sexism?”; “Are Nursing Strikes Ethical? New Research Raises the Stakes”; and “Workplace Violence Against Nurses: Neither Inevitable or Acceptable.”

But putting aside these contenders (why do so many of them have questions in their titles?), here are the top 10 (again, according to our readers) new posts of 2011, in case you missed them along the way. Which doesn’t mean that these are (necessarily) our best posts, or a representative sample, or that many others didn’t hit home for various subgroups of readers.

While we all get a little tired of lists by this time in the year, we don’t really use them an awful lot here at Off the Charts. So please indulge us this once, and thanks to everyone who wrote, read, and commented on this blog in 2011.—Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

1. “Notes of a Student Nurse: A Dose of Reality,” by Jennifer-Clare Williams

2. “Placenta Facebook Photos: Nurse and […]

2016-11-21T13:11:07-05:00December 20th, 2011|healthcare social media|2 Comments
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Patient Privacy and Company Policy: What Nurses Should Know About Social Media

Should you be able to have an online discussion about hospital policies that aren’t working or are unfair? What if the point of your discussion is to improve working conditions or to troubleshoot and not to cast an uncomplimentary light on your employer? Right now, the answer is “good question.”

If you’re a nurse or health care worker of any sort, if you sometimes use one or more of the many available social media options (Facebook, blogging, Twitter, etc.), if you’re worried about what it’s OK for you to do or say online, if you have a job or are thinking of looking for one, we strongly suggest you take a look at this month’s iNurse column in AJN (quoted above).

In it, Megen Duffy, RN, aka blogger Not Nurse Ratched, considers such issues as the following:

  • hospital social media policies (always read them; some are surprisingly restrictive)
  • HIPAA and potential issues raised by blogging about aspects of work
  • the ways your social media history may be mined by HR departments at prospective employers
  • the reasons why she strongly believes that social media isn’t going away and has many potential benefits, despite various well-publicized pitfalls—and why nurses need to let their input be known so that social media policies will be sane and balanced

And, since this is social media, we hope you’ll let us know your thoughts, in the form of comments. Maybe Megen will even weigh in, if you […]

2016-11-21T13:12:03-05:00August 26th, 2011|career, healthcare social media|4 Comments
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Killing Traditional Nursing Duties #1

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

We recently had a lot of feedback to a question we posted on our Facebook page: “We know old habits die hard and nursing has a lot of them. What old habits do you think we should kill? NPO after midnight? Routine temps on every patient?”

We got several good responses:

– Waking patients up at 4am for blood drawing, routine vital signs

– Measuring intake and output on every patient

– Taking routine temps

– Giving dorsogluteal IM injections

– Doing a skin prep for an IV by swabbing the site in a circular motion, inside to out (some manufacturers of products are instructing that skin prep be done by a scrubbing motion)

– Enemas before childbirth

– Double documenting

– Rushing to give medications right on time (which makes one prone to error)

– NPO after midnight

Choosing from the above, we then asked this: “Survey question #1: Do you routinely wake patients up at night to check their vital signs? If not, when would you?”

This question received many comments, from “Of course not” and “only when necessary” to “If a doc orders q 4 vs and you don’t do it and something happens to the patient, that would not be good for you AT ALL.” Also this: “Orders are orders which we must follow.”

Commenters cited several stories of recent postoperative patients (who, I agree, should have vital signs frequently monitored) who could have suffered grave consequences had the nurse not woken them […]

2016-11-21T13:12:04-05:00August 24th, 2011|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|6 Comments
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AJN’s Top 10 Blog Posts for the Last Quarter

At this blog we’re not always devoted practitioners of the art of the list. Used too often and too cynically (some of the more mysterious nursing blogs consist entirely of lists of articles and excerpts from other blogs), lists can be just another form of journalistic cannibalism.

But it sometimes occurs to me, as I publish a new post that takes its place at the top of the home page and pushes all those below down another notch (until, after a few such nudges, they gradually fall off the page, entering the purgatory of the blog archives), that this isn’t entirely fair.

While blogs allow for quick reaction to a news story, a public health emergency or controversy, a new bit of published research, they are also places for writing that isn’t so narrowly tied to a specific date and event. Many thoughtful posts by excellent writers have been published here in the past couple of years. With this in mind, here’s a list of the 10 most read blog posts for the past 90 days. It doesn’t mean that these are necessarily the very best posts we published in that time, or that they were even published in the last 90 days . . . but it’s one way of measuring relevance.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor 

1. Dispatches from the Alabama Tornado Zone
This one is actually a page with links to a series of powerful and thought-provoking posts by Susan Hassmiller, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, who volunteered with the Red Cross after the devastating Alabama tornadoes in late April of this year.

2. 

2016-11-21T13:12:17-05:00August 2nd, 2011|healthcare social media, nursing perspective, students|1 Comment
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