Nurses spend more time with patients than most other types of providers and have unique insight into patient care and the the healthcare system.

Feel the Power (What Nursing Can Learn from the Dancing Man)

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief—Writing in a recent blog post on NursingTimes.net (a UK-based site), Mark Radcliffe poses this question:

“Do you, as a nurse, feel you have any collective power to influence policy? Are we as well versed as other professional groups in articulating loudly and clearly why nursing needs to be the foundation stone of any health service?”

I thought it was a good question for us here in the United States. Most U.S. nursing associations, nurse executives, and deans are invested in politics. The recent Institute of Medicine Report on the Future of Nursing is the most recent example of how nursing is collectively trying to influence health policy.

But I still wonder how many nurses involved in direct care feel that the politics of health is something they need to pay attention to. It seems that it’s only when it becomes part of the job, directly affects one’s ability to perform a job, or has an impact on one’s financial well-being that many people get involved.

When I was a young nurse, I and many in my cohort didn’t pay attention to things like politics or getting involved in associations. We were new and intent on acquiring skills and becoming competent in our jobs, and politics seemed esoteric and something we needn’t be concerned about.

But within two years, I found myself in court on a workmen’s compensation claim for an illness I’d contracted from a patient. I was going to be out of work for four to six […]

2016-11-21T13:12:29-05:00July 5th, 2011|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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If the Patient Doesn’t Understand the Treatment: New Essay by Theresa Brown

Ben’s inability to understand even the basics of his situation, combined with his lack of family support, made it seem that we were in effect imprisoning him and torturing him.

That’s an excerpt from the Reflections essay in the June issue of AJN. By Theresa Brown, a nurse who regularly writes for the New York Times “Well” blog, “Right Treatment, Right Patient?” explores the ethics and emotions involved in providing an unpleasant but potentially life-saving treatment to a patient who can’t understand what’s being done to him (click through to the PDF for the best version).

We hope you’ll read it through and let us know if you’ve ever faced a similar ethical quandary as a health care professional (or, for that matter, as a family member or patient).—JM, senior editor

2016-11-21T13:12:31-05:00June 27th, 2011|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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So What? An Invitation to Nurses To Tell Us How They’re Translating Research into Practice

By Inge B. Corless, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, Boston, and Brian Goodroad, DNP, RN, AACRN, nurse practitioner and associate professor at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota

by centralasian/via Flickr

Crossing the Quality Chasm, an Institute of Medicine report from 2001, bemoans the chasm between our current research knowledge and the current state of care. Back in 2003, Don Berwick, now the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, provided the following pithy codification of the problem in a JAMA article called “Disseminating Innovations in Health Care” (subscription required; click here for the abstract): “Failing to use available science is costly and harmful; it leads to overuse of unhelpful care, underuse of effective care, and errors in execution.” Berwick pondered the slow pace of innovation adoption and attributed it to three factors:

  • the characteristics of the innovation
  • the characteristics of the potential adopters
  • contextual factors

Berwick also made this observation about innovations that do get adopted: “Health care is rich in evidence-based innovations, yet even when such innovations are implemented successfully in one location, they often disseminate slowly—if at all.”

Given these obstacles, what can be done to facilitate the integration of research findings into practice? What can be done to change this situation, and what would this entail?

One step is to […]

2017-05-27T10:28:00-04:00June 17th, 2011|nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment
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Year of the Nurse? ‘Don’t Get Mad, Get Elected’

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief—Comparing the increase of nurses in Congress in the 2010 midterm elections to the near doubling of the number of women in Congress back in 1992, an article in a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation electronic newsletter last week suggested that perhaps 2010 could be called ‘The Year of the Nurse.’ The article noted that there are now seven nurses in the U.S. House of Representatives—four Democrats and three Republicans—up from three in the previous Congress. This is certainly progress, but we’ve yet to gain a nurse in the U.S. Senate.

Nurses see the results of failed social policies every day. We do tremendous work providing restorative care, teaching self-care practices, and promoting behaviors that will maximize health. But how many of us seriously think of engaging in the politics of health care? Instead of promoting health and changing lives on a case-by-case basis, when you hold political office you can affect the health of an entire population. Nursing education provides us with an incredible set of skills: critical thinking, creative problem solving, people skills, time management, the ability to set priorities and to constantly reevaluate their order—to say nothing of multitasking. […]

2016-11-21T13:12:42-05:00June 15th, 2011|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Getting Nursing News (Whether You Like It Or Not)

By Gail M. Pfeifer, AJN news director

During a recent public radio interview between Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and former senior advisor to President Obama, and Republican strategist Frank Luntz (author of Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear), Dunn remarked that folks “increasingly seek people they already agree with to get their news from.” (Here’s the show’s transcript.)

That is a sad commentary on the state of news journalism today. By definition, a journalist’s report should be fair and unbiased. And news reporting, above all, should be held to that high standard.

If you read AJN’s news department regularly (here’s the current issue’s table of contents; scroll down to find links to the new articles), and we hope you do, we should tell you how we try to maintain such standards. […]

2016-11-21T13:12:44-05:00June 10th, 2011|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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