AJN News: A Role for Nonmedical Workers, Adult Vaccinations Revisited, Teen Pregnancy Drop, More

AJN’s monthly news section covers timely and important research and policy stories that are relevant to the nursing world. Here are some of the stories you’ll find in our current issue (news articles in AJN are free access):

A community health worker meets with a patient in Baltimore, Maryland. Photo by Francis Ying / KHN.

Nonmedical Workers: A Growing Asset to Communities

Outcomes improve, costs drop, and nurses’ workloads benefit when nonmedical community health workers are available to serve as liaisons between health systems and patients. Programs to train more of these workers are gaining attention in states across the country.

Revisiting the Adult Vaccination Schedule for Tetanus and Diphtheria

Results of a new study reveal that most adults remain protected from the two diseases for 30 years without booster vaccination—and call into question the potential benefits of a modified adult booster vaccination schedule.

Teen Pregnancies, Births, and Abortions Slow

Two new reports show that the birth rate among U.S. teens has dropped to its lowest point in three decades; the percentage of teen pregnancies ending in abortion also reached a historic low. Researchers attribute the downward trend to teens using birth control more […]

2016-11-21T13:01:06-05:00July 7th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing stories|0 Comments
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The Debriefing: A Forced Pause After an Unexpected Clinical Loss

Illustration by Barbara Hranilovich for AJN Illustration by Barbara Hranilovich for AJN

The Reflections essay in the July issue of AJN is about the brief required debriefing of a medical team after an all-consuming struggle to save a patient.

“The Power of Paperwork” is written by Amanda Anderson, an experienced nurse who is new to a supervisory role. She remains closely attuned to the emotional experiences of nurses and physicians. Leading her former colleagues as they huddled to examine what might have been done differently with a particular patient, she tells us, she found that her “suit and heels provided no armor.”

Sometimes bad things happen for perfectly obvious reasons. If you don’t turn an incontinent patient, he will develop pressure ulcers. If you don’t always verify your patient’s medication against the order and identifiers, you will likely give the wrong drug to the wrong person at some point. The factors involved in such errors can be complex, of course, but remain fairly easy to trace.

Sometimes, though, people just die. We don’t know why, and if we find out, it’s usually not reassuring. The thoughts that follow these deaths—what if […]

2016-11-21T13:01:07-05:00June 27th, 2016|narratives, Nursing, nursing stories|0 Comments
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Patients Change Us: A Formative Nursing Experience

From boliston, via Flickr From boliston, via Flickr

Many years ago, I was given the greatest gift by a patient who had no idea he would change my life and define my professional outlook as a nurse. While not every nurse will be fortunate enough to have such an explicit experience of the effect of the care they provide so early in their career, I believe that each patient you come in contact with is changing your life as much as you are changing theirs.

Quantity of Care vs. Quality of Care

Nursing has evolved into a highly technical profession grounded in scientific evidence, a profession that works to improve patient outcomes and shorten hospital stays. Research and technology support this work in innumerable ways.

But while nurses must be technical experts, drug experts, and efficiency experts, they must also do their best to alleviate the suffering of those in their charge. These many concurrent demands can result in high burnout rates among nurses as well as fragmented care for patients.

The quantity of care today’s nurse provides must go hand in hand with the quality of care. My own definition of quality care is focusing on patients as more than just a set of signs, symptoms, numbers, and processes in need of monitoring and […]

2016-11-21T13:01:07-05:00June 22nd, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing stories, patient experience|1 Comment
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A Nurses’ Week Visit with Theresa Brown

Nurse and author Theresa Brown Nurse and author Theresa Brown

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with nurse Theresa Brown (you can listen to our conversation here). Brown writes AJN’s quarterly What I’m Reading column. (This month, she writes about Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.)

Theresa Brown also blogs for the New York Times and is the author of The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives, which I first wrote about when it was released last July. As I noted then, it’s probably the first book I’ve read that really captures certain elements of nurses’ work:

Anyone who wants to know what it’s like to be a nurse in a hospital today should read this book. Patients, families, and non-nurse colleagues tend to see nurses as ever-present yet often in the background, quietly moving from room to room, attending to patients, and distributing medications or charting at computers.

But what they don’t understand about what nurses do is what Brown so deftly describes—the cognitive multitasking and constant reordering of priorities that occur in the course of one shift as Brown manages the needs of four very different patients (she was working in a stem cell transplant unit at the time); completes admissions and […]

2016-11-21T13:01:14-05:00May 4th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing stories, patient experience|2 Comments
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That Ordinary Nightmare Shift

Sandy Klever, RN, currently works in hospice care in Des Moines, Iowa. At the time of the events described here, she was working on a medical/surgical floor at a Veterans Administration hospital.

julie kertesz/ via flickr creative common julie kertesz/ via flickr creative common

“Can you work tomorrow evening?” sweet-talks my nurse manager. Even though I will miss handing out treats on Halloween, I say yes. “But what about all my candy?” I ask. “Just bring it with you!”

Halloween night should be an easy shift. Do not say the ‘Q’ word, I tell myself. As I’m drinking coffee in the staff room, I’m assigned to four familiar patients, one of whom is a discharge.

Then the door opens and a colleague hands me a notecard about a direct admit coming from the ER, tells me that he’s having a COPD exacerbation and is homeless.

Well, I can manage a COPDer. At least he’s not a challenging laryngectomy patient transferring from the ICU.

“Oh, and by the way,” my colleague adds, “he’s confused and bipolar.”

Off to the floor! Because his room is still being cleaned, I have plenty of time. Within minutes, I have performed a complete assessment on my first patient. Moving on to my second patient, I see a commotion in the hallway and realize my new admit is coming on a cart already. As we […]

2016-11-21T13:01:17-05:00April 25th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing stories|3 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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