Blogging: As Many Voices as There Are Nurses

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior 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

A recent check reveals that a good percentage of the blogs on our nursing blogs list have been relatively active over the past few months. A few have been less so. I didn’t see any posts about the ice-bucket challenge, and that’s okay. Here are a few recent and semirecent posts by nurses that might interest readers of this blog:

Hospice nursing. At Hospice Diary, a post from a few weeks back is called “Dying with Your Boots On.” An excerpt:

As I drove down a switch-back gravel drive in the middle of nowhere, I pulled into a driveway and there in a sun-warmed grassy yard sitting perfectly still on a garden swing among buzzing bees and newly bloomed flowers was a fellow in a crisp white shirt, a matching white cowboy hat, black leather boots and a crooked smile.  I stepped out of my car and told him for a moment I thought he was the garden scarecrow, until he tipped his hat.

Nurse-midwifery. A post on At Your Cervix: Tales of a New CNM, First […]

2016-11-21T13:04:03-05:00August 20th, 2014|healthcare social media, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Writer or Nurse? The Costs of an Untold Story

Amanda Anderson, BSN, RN, CCRN, works in critical care in New York City and is enrolled in the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing/Baruch College of Public Affairs dual master’s degree program in nursing administration and public administration. Her blog is called This Nurse Wonders.

via Wikimedia Commons via Wikimedia Commons

I found myself getting annoyed with a dying cancer patient today. I don’t think this is an occurrence any honest nurse would deny, but when I could feel my blood pressure rise every time she dry-heaved, I knew it’d been a mistake to come to work this morning.

Not my proudest moment.

You see, I’ve felt my nursing self change of late, with an urge growing within me to slowly step back from the bedside, at least for a bit. Perhaps it’s school and the clarification of future goals forming in my mind, but clinical work has felt more like job-work, and this other work, this future work that largely centers on telling my nursing story, is becoming what I think of as calling-work.

Staring down at my poor patient, I realized I’d swung the balance of bedside work and calling-work too much to one side lately. I’ve been working—as a nurse—too much, and working—as a writer and a student—too little. After seven years of bedside nursing, and the joys and trials of per […]

2016-11-21T13:04:34-05:00June 4th, 2014|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|8 Comments
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Telehealth as ‘Disruptive Innovation’ in Nursing

A patient uses telehealth equipment to communicate with his nurse. Photo courtesy of Janet Grady. A patient uses telehealth equipment to communicate with his nurse. Photo courtesy of Janet Grady.

“Telehealth: A Case Study in Disruptive Innovation” is a CE article in AJN‘s April issue. The author, Janet Grady, vice president of academic affairs and chair of the Nursing and Health Sciences Division at the University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, describes the concept of disruptive innovations in nursing and delves into the evolving field of telehealth as a current example.

The article considers the following:

  • uses and potential uses of telehealth in chronic and acute care, home care, and rural medicine, and the evidence supporting its use.
  • obstacles to wider use and acceptance of telehealth, which include cultural resistance within nursing, licensure issues across states, reimbursement challenges, and the need to adapt nursing curriculum to these new ways of delivering care.
  • forces that drive or obstruct disruptive innovations like telehealth.

Here’s the article overview:

Technologic advances in health care have often outpaced our ability to integrate the technology efficiently, establish best practices for its use, and develop policies to regulate and evaluate its effectiveness. However, these may be insufficient reasons to put the brakes on innovation—particularly those “disruptive innovations” that challenge […]

2016-11-21T13:05:00-05:00April 18th, 2014|digital health, Nursing, patient engagement|1 Comment
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What Advice Would You Give a New Nursing Student? Our Readers Respond…

KarenRoushBy Karen Roush, MSN, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

My daughter Kim is starting nursing school next month, so last week I asked AJN’s Facebook followers for the best piece of advice I could give her. The response was overwhelming: over 600 people offered wisdom, encouragement, and tips for success. I went through and read them all and the following is an attempt to synthesize the advice.

Of course, with so many responses, there were many valuable pieces of advice I had to leave out, from the practical to the profound, such as:

sit in the front of class, stick to your principles, invest in good shoes, choose clinicals that push you out of your comfort zone, be early for everything, celebrate the small victories, get a really good stethoscope up front, believe in yourself, pick the hardest patient you can at clinical, audiorecord the lectures, be truthful and committed to your work, eat healthy, get to know your instructors, coffee and chocolate!

And finally: look into the eyes of your patients and be sure they know you care. Every patient, every time.

(Oh, and not to leave out the lighthearted—Don’t hold your nose in clinicals. The teachers frown on that.)

Below are five areas of advice that stood out:

1) “Take a […]

2016-11-21T13:05:03-05:00April 9th, 2014|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective, students|8 Comments
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Recent Nurse Blog Posts of Interest, Inhaled Insulin, a Note on Top Blogs Lists

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

Here you will find some links to nursing blog posts, a look at this week’s Affordable Care Act health exchange enrollment numbers, and a couple of items of interest about new treatments or studies, plus a note on blogs that award other blogs badges. A grab bag, so bear with me…

crocus shoots, early spring, I think/ via Wikimedia Commons crocus shoots, early spring, I think/ via Wikimedia Commons

At the nursing blogs:

RehabRN has a post about a friend who was bullied by a nurse of much higher authority in the same hospital. Such stories, if true, are always upsetting. What can you do but take it when the power differential is so great?

At the INQRI blog (I’m not going to tell you what the initials stand for except that it has something to with quality, research, and nursing), there’s a post about why stroke survivors need a team approach to palliative care.

Megen Duffy (aka Not Nurse Ratched) has a really very good post at a site she sometimes blogs for. I already shared it via a tweet yesterday, but it deserves more. It’s called “Nursing Will Change You.”

At Infusion Nurse Blog, there’s a post addressing IV solution shortages (now happening on top of shortages […]

2016-11-21T13:05:04-05:00April 4th, 2014|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|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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