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 […]
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 […]
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.
Drunk on Water, Drug Shortages, Understanding Health Care News, Plus Nursing Blog Posts of Note
The water myth: A physician, writing in the British Medical Journal (abstract only), has looked at the evidence for drinking eight glasses of water a day and says the oft-recommended practice is “debunked nonsense,” a myth the bottled water companies have been only too happy to exploit and that many respected health care organizations and experts continue to support. Maybe common sense reasoning is also partly to blame—after all, the idea seems to make sense. And all that water certainly conjures images of purification, which is inevitably appealing in a world of pervasive toxins, chemicals, food additives, and the like, and in a time when fewer people in any given Western country practice the same or similar religious sacraments or rituals, practices that may—among other functions—have once served a similar “purifying” psychologic purpose.
Drug shortages: The Wall Street Journal Health Blog has reported on two surveys that suggest that “unprecedented” drug shortages are being experienced by most hospitals. The reasons are multiple: shortage rumors that prompt hoarding, FDA actions that halt production, lack of a crucial ingredient, poor inventory management, and others:
All treatment categories were affected, hospitals said, with 80% or more respondents experiencing shortages of surgery/anesthesia, emergency care, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal/nutrition, pain or infectious disease drugs. And 66% of hospitals reported shortages of cancer drugs. Some […]