Ketamine as a Therapeutic Option, AI and Nurse Staffing, Naloxone Training, and Other March Issue Highlights

The March issue of AJN is now live.

Here are some highlights. Some articles are open access or temporarily free; others will require log-in for access.

In this month’s editorial, “A Turning Point in Psychiatry,” AJN‘s editor-in-chief Carl Kirton discusses key aspects of the current mental health crisis and explores whether a paradigm shift to more rapid treatment with drugs like ketamine and MDMA may be in sight for at least some percentage of those in need (the editorial is always free). Writes Kirton:

“The promise of ketamine therapy is not that it will ‘replace’ everything else, but that it may signal a broader turning point: psychiatry moving beyond slow-onset, monoamine-focused treatments toward interventions that target rapid symptom relief.”

In addition, the CE article (CE articles are free) in the March issue reviews current evidence on ketamine as a mental health treatment. Discussing the use of ketamine for treatment-resistant depression, the authors write:

This article provides “a foundation of clinical information that nurses should understand as they advise patients who are receiving or curious about ketamine” and discusses “the regulatory, ethical, and nursing implications of using ketamine in the treatment of mental health disorders.”

The Viewpoint in this issue, “

2026-02-24T09:19:20-05:00February 24th, 2026|Nursing, Nursing education, nursing research, Quality improvement|0 Comments
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Clarifying the DNP Role, Assessing Discharge Readiness: Highlights in our February Issue

The February issue of AJN is now live. Here are some highlights.

In this issue, a review article (CE credit available), “Nurses in the Fight to End Food Insecurity: An Integrative Review,” synthesizes and analyzes findings of nurse-involved studies that address food insecurity, identifying key interventions and outcomes across diverse health care and community settings.

Notably, there are a number of open access articles in this issue:

“Assessing Discharge Readiness and Influencing Factors Among Patients with Aortic Dissection: A Cross-Sectional Study” is an original research (and open access) article. The authors note that this study “revealed that patients with aortic dissection generally had discharge readiness scores at the lower end of the moderate range, indicating the need for improvement. It’s imperative that health care providers emphasize patient education prior to discharge and develop and implement personalized discharge plans.”

The second open access original research article in our February issue is “An Examination of Factors Affecting Bowel Preparation for Colonoscopy: A Meta-Analysis.” According to the authors, “Health care providers, including nurses, should consider these determinants of bowel preparation effectiveness and implement appropriate interventions in a timely manner to enhance patient education and care.”

Our […]

2026-01-22T15:16:34-05:00January 22nd, 2026|Nursing, Nursing education, nursing research, Quality improvement|0 Comments
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To Address the Nursing Faculty Shortage, Start with the Pay Gap

The salary gap between clinical and faculty roles.

Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash

There is a national shortage of nursing faculty to educate the future nurse workforce. The biggest barrier to recruiting and retaining nursing faculty is the salary gap between the faculty and clinical nursing roles. Nurses routinely take pay cuts of as much as $40,000 when leaving clinical practice to teach full-time. The faculty role is vital to the health of the profession, and it is particularly important to recruit excellent educators with relevant clinical experience.

The salary gap raises a clear question: why would one choose to leave clinical practice and take a pay cut? Unfortunately, many nursing advocacy organizations have been silent on this issue, a silence that has contributed to the worsening of the nurse faculty workforce shortage. In 2023, there were 1,977 full-time faculty vacancies that were unfilled, or 7.8% of the faculty workforce. Faculty shortages are projected to worsen over the next decade as an aging faculty workforce approaches retirement.

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2024-07-23T11:30:48-04:00June 14th, 2024|Nursing, Nursing education|3 Comments
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The ‘World’s Meanest’ Clinical Nursing Instructor

When I was growing up, my mother kept a short essay called “I Had the World’s Meanest Mother” displayed in our house. She really loved that essay. What I’m writing today is inspired by that essay. It’s not for mothers but for all those clinical instructors who continue to cultivate the next generation of nurses.

Student nurse giving a patient a metabolism test/Library of Congress

As I sit in the classroom and hear my colleagues talk about their clinical instructors, I remember my own and think to myself that I’m the one who had the meanest clinical instructor: She kept us in clinical for our entire allotted time. Not only that, but she frequently reminded us of the importance of our clinical rotation by saying things like “you are paying for an education,” “this will help you to be successful in your NCLEX preparation,” and “you will become a great nurse.”

In some ways that clinical instructor reminded me of Mary Poppins—she always carried a bag and she seemed to pull an endless number of items out of its depths: NCLEX questions with a list of rationales; an NCLEX blueprint (she had a few copies); concept map templates; a medication book; even […]

2024-05-21T11:44:47-04:00May 21st, 2024|Nursing, Nursing education|4 Comments
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Creating a Disaster Simulation for Nursing Students

A nursing student treats a volunteer acting as a disaster victim during a high-fidelity simulation at the University of South Carolina Aiken Convocation Center. Photo courtesy of the authors.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in the United States “there were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020.” With the number of disasters increasing in recent years, preparedness is crucial.

Many simulationists may believe that creating a disaster simulation is complicated, expensive, and requires a lot of resources. The opposite is true if you have enough support from your organization and community. The only cost incurred during our disaster management simulation project for nursing students at our institution was the cost of make-up to create realistic wounds.

Finding a gap in student knowledge.

The first thing we did was to perform a needs assessment. We knew that our students were not well prepared in our program for caring for patients during a disaster. In the past, this area of content was never really addressed in our curriculum. As we were […]

2024-04-08T12:03:27-04:00April 8th, 2024|disaster preparedness, Nursing, Nursing education, Public health, simulation|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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