A Note on the Life Cycle of Blogs

This is just to say that we realize that personal blogs by nurses have life cycles. They wax and they wane. While a core few are updated consistently, with the occasional gap for a vacation, and live on and on, evolving their appearances or keeping the old reliable appearance, many more simply die a quiet natural death. In many cases, no one plays taps. They served their purpose, they were noticed by a few or many of us, and then they quietly grew quiet.

Sometimes the bloggers say goodbye. Sometimes they just stop as if abducted by aliens. Or by their lives, or jobs, or illness, or death, or families, or by an alter ego. Well, that last bit is just speculation. Often the blogs live on, like deserted homes with the furniture still in them, never growing dusty, never surrounded by weeds or visible decay yet somehow sad. Or not so sad: testaments to an episode in a life in which a voice was raised with humor or outrage or questioning in a solitary room with a keyboard somewhere after the kids were in bed or while the DVR recorded the latest episode of something or other or early in the morning while the plows scraped the streets of the night’s snowfall.

Some nurse bloggers are more bloggers than nurses, […]

What Is Meaningful Use? One Savvy Nurse’s Take

By Jared Sinclair, an ICU nurse in Nashville who has a blog about health care and technology

If you follow health care news regularly, and yet you still feel unsure what “meaningful use” means and how it will affect your job as a nurse, then you have something in common with even the most knowledgeable people on the subject. Despite the fact that discussion of meaningful use among health care IT and informatics folks has reached a fever pitch since the HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act was passed last February, in many ways we are no closer to understanding how it will change health care than when discussion first began.

What do we know for sure? The HITECH Act promises incentive payments to providers and hospitals that use electronic health records in ways that meet a minimum set of requirements called “meaningful use.” That sounds simple enough; however, there isn’t just one set of requirements. The criteria for meaningful use will come in three stages, and the requirements for stages two and three have yet to be determined. This is why your local hospital’s nurse informaticists may be less than enthusiastic about the next five years of their jobs. They bear the responsibility for preparing their hospitals for huge changes—without the luxury of knowing what those […]

2016-11-21T13:15:16-05:00October 14th, 2010|digital health, Nursing|1 Comment

The Latest From a Persistent Campaign to Increase the Accuracy and Usefulness of Health News Reporting

Here at AJN we’ve always been inspired by the work of Gary Schwitzer, whose Web site Health News Review has grown increasingly influential in its role as a watchdog of the accuracy of health news reporting. Schwitzer has recently been blogging from the “Selling Sickness” conference in Amsterdam. Below is a short video interview he shot with the Australian physician Dr. Peter Mansfield, who runs an organization called Healthy Skepticism—and who compares “industry-occupied medicine” to a communist state in its power to control information and drown out dissenting voices. Whether you’re a journalist, a provider, or a potential patient, Schwitzer’s ongoing analysis of health care news provides a model for understanding and filtering the flood of information we get about medications, testing, and various conditions.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ_ER2xSzG0]

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Why Didn’t Physicians Know What Nurses Know?

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

A recent post on our blog highlighted the experience of AJN’s associate editor Amy Collins in trying to get someone to diagnose the underlying reason for acute confusion in her grandmother. Over a two-week period, Amy’s grandmother was seen by various private and ED physicians, none of whom seemed to have an adequate diagnosis or a suggestion for treatment. Finally, nurses suggested that a urinary tract infection (UTI), fecal impaction, or some other infection might be a factor. It was a fecal impaction and yet none of the five physicians who previously evaluated Amy’s grandmother had thought about or assessed for it.

What the nurses said. Amy’s post generated many comments, both on the blog and on our Facebook page. What was interesting to me was how many nurses knew to first check for a UTI, electrolyte disturbance, or fecal impaction as a reason for confusion. Here are a few samples:

“Though not conclusive, in every case I have seen a change in cognition or behavior it was either a UTI or fecal impaction. I work in home health as a CNA and I am a nursing student.”

“The first thing I think to check is infection (UTI) with elderly, confused patients.”

“I’m a senior nursing student…and this material is on our exam that we are taking Friday. With acute confusion, always check for UTI and constipation.”

“Possible UTI. Possible dehydration &/or  constipation. Poor nutrition. All can (and do) manifest as “altered mental status.” Think I’d start with […]

I Simulate, Therefore I Am…

One after another, the student nurses pump the hand sanitizer dispenser and approach the bedside. They turn the patient’s name band to check his birth date and full name and say, in that singsong manner typical of young adults, “Good morning, Mr. Johnson, I’m your nurse today. How are you feeling?” The patient is a manikin called SimMan, short for simulation man, and I’m his voice. Hidden behind a one-way mirror, I also control SimMan’s physiological responses to the students’ interventions. My goal is to replicate the essential aspects of a clinical situation in order to prepare the students to encounter them in a living patient.

That’s the start of the September Reflections essay, written by a nursing instructor who experiences a curious role reversal as he plays the patient in a simulation exercise. Read the rest of it here, and let us know what you think.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

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