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

Sand, Surf, and CF

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, clinical editor at AJN

Ever wonder how the staff at AJN decide what to put on our covers? We wanted an image that celebrated the summer, but we also wanted a tie-in with our CE feature. The August cover depicting children running down the beach at Sunny Shores Sea Camp, a four-day summer camp that caters to children with cystic fibrosis (CF) and their families, is a perfect fit. 

Some former colleagues once volunteered at the camp. Several years ago I was working on a pediatric floor where several of our patients had CF, ranging in age from toddlers to adults in their 30s. CF was long considered a childhood disease, due to a short life expectancy associated with it; even though life expectancy has drastically increased, these patients are still often treated on pediatric units, regardless of their age. This month’s CE, Original Research: Parents and Children with Cystic Fibrosis, is by Paula Harff Lomas, MAS, RN, CCRP, and Susan B. Fowler, PhD, RN, CNRN. According to Lomas and Fowler,

“More people with cystic fibrosis are living longer, reaching milestones like starting college, embarking on careers, and marrying. Many adults with cystic fibrosis are interested in starting families; one recent review notes that the number of live births to women with the disease has increased significantly. Thus, there’s a greater need for age-appropriate care in areas such as fertility and reproduction.”

The purpose of this descriptive study was to […]

2016-11-21T13:16:07-05:00August 13th, 2010|nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Social Media and Nurses — Does Betty White Have a Point?

50 Social Media Icons/Ivan Walsh, via Flickr

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

I’ve been extremely busy and have had trouble finding time to write a post for this blog. And it’s not enough just to write a post—we’ve got to think about what should go on Facebook and what should be Tweeted, whether we should do a mention in the eNewsletter and if a topic deserves a spot on AJN’s home page. All this communication takes time.

When she hosted Saturday Night Live, the inimitable Betty White acknowledged all the fans on Facebook who were the driving force behind the campaign to have her become the host. She confessed she didn’t know what Facebook was, and said, “Now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it seems like a huge waste of time.”

Facebook and Twitter sort of remind me of the Valentine’s Day card exchange in grammar school—everyone bought boxes of 100 cards (actually, more like small, cheap postcards) so you could give them out and, hopefully, get as many in return. It was about the number of cards you could collect—even if they were from classmates you didn’t care about or even disliked. You felt good if you had lots of cards and people saw […]

2016-11-21T13:16:12-05:00August 9th, 2010|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|5 Comments
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Open Medical Records: A Question of Safety

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

We’ve all watched our health care provider writing or typing while we answered questions or described our symptoms. Before becoming a nurse I used to wonder what they were putting in my chart and if they got it right. And now that I am a nurse I can’t believe how often a medical assistant or nurse will take my vital signs and write them down without telling me what they are. How can it be possible that adults are kept from knowing their own or their children’s health information? Back when I worked on a pediatric floor my colleagues gasped in shock when I allowed a parent of one of my patients to look at his child’s chart. And I actually let them make me feel like I had done something wrong!

Last week this issue was the topic of a column by Dr. Pauline W. Chen in the New York Times, where two related blog posts (here and here) also received much reader commentary. The sudden flurry of interest in the subject was occasioned by an article published in the Annals of Internal Medicine detailing the preliminary findings of a study following a national project called OpenNotes, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in which “more than 100 primary care physicians and 25,000 of their patients will have access to personal medical records online for a 12-month period beginning in summer 2010.” Readers’ comments ranged from one extreme to the other, such […]

2016-11-21T13:16:18-05:00August 3rd, 2010|nursing perspective, patient engagement|3 Comments
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On Difficult Truths, Anger, and Compassion: Recent Poems in ‘Art of Nursing’

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

“Why couldn’t you leave cleanly?” asks the narrator of Ann Sihler’s poem, “Leavings,” featured in the June Art of Nursing. The poem, written in response to a suicide, speaks to the emotions of those left behind. Its central image, a pair of “oxblood loafers lying there / for all to see,” is somehow both mundane and horrifying. It’s a stark poem, suffused with the narrator’s anger; yet its lack of pretension also affords us  relief.

The married man with “schoolboy cheeks” in Nancey Kinlin’s poem, “Practicing at Post Office Square,” has just heard what no one wants to hear: “the result / is positive.” The poem, featured in July’s Art of Nursing, gives us the disclosure—from the nurse’s point of view. It’s a poem about mistakes and compassion, about what it feels like to be the one delivering bad news. Kinlin’s spare, clear writing doesn’t flinch from its difficult subject.

Both poems are free online (you’ll need to click through to the PDF files). We invite you to have a look, sit with them, and tell us what they evoke for you in the comments.

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2016-11-21T13:16:20-05:00July 30th, 2010|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Ms. Nightingale as an Applied Statistician

By Sue Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN (latest in a series of posts by Hassmiller, who’s spending her summer vacation retracing crucial steps in Florence Nightingale’s innovative career)
 
Here at the home of Florence Nightingale, Embley Park (for more on Embley Park, see last week’s blog post), approximately 100 people have convened to study the impact of the “Lady with the Lamp.” The lady herself was multifaceted, and so is this crowd of scholars. There are nurse leaders, of course, but also museum curators, historians, educators, and biographers. They are all interested in their own piece, but also in how their piece fits into the bigger whole of her life. Today we heard Professor Thomas from the University of Southampton School of Business discuss her contributions as an applied statistician.
   

Representing mortality. Early in her life, Ms. Nightingale identified the need for hospitals and healthcare systems to collect and use data to improve care. She asked what use are statistics “if we don’t know what to make of them?” She is credited with developing the famous “coxcomb” illustration, which was a multidimensional way of depicting mortality rates. She used statistics at Scutari Hospital (also called Selimiye Barracks) in Turkey to guide her actions and used statistics and data in the London Times to convey […]

2016-11-21T13:16:32-05:00July 20th, 2010|health care policy, nursing history, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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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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