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

Why I Like Nurses Week

Safety Plan Safety Plan/Plougmann/via Flickr

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Here’s why I like Nurses Week. I’m sure some folks groan over the idea that for only one week out of the year, health care administrators actually think about all that nurses do and show their appreciation. My perspective is that at least we have one solid week with the spotlight on nursing, when we can toot our horns and make sure that people know the critical role of nursing in health care.

Sure, there are some people who will never “get” what nurses do beyond the old stereotype that nurses are doctors’ helpers. I’m always flabbergasted, though, when physicians—after so much time working alongside nurses as medical students, interns, and residents—still don’t have a more nuanced view of nursing.

In this month’s editorial, I address the American Nurses Association Nurses Week theme, “Culture of Safety: It Starts with You.” How many times, in the dead of night, have nurses called physicians to alert them to a critical change—or questioned an inappropriately ordered medication that, if given as ordered, could have had dire consequences? I also addressed this issue in a 2014 blog post about Arnold Relman, […]

2016-11-21T13:01:13-05:00May 11th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, patient safety|1 Comment
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The Nurses Week Prizes We Really Need

Amanda Anderson, formerly a graduate intern at AJN, is now a contributing editor

Culture_of_Safety_2016My first Nurses Week as a nurse, my mother sent me a card and a small gift. When I opened it, I was surprised by its message—no one had ever given me anything for Nurses Week during nursing school. I had no idea that the holiday even existed.

As an English Literature major–turned nursing student, I was pretty clueless about the world of nursing when I launched my career. I spent most of my first year fumbling around in the dark, looking for Florence’s light.

As years passed, I learned more about nursing, claimed it as my own, and became versed in the industry secrets. I started to take pride in Nurses Week, seeing it as a venue for speaking out about nursing.

One year, for the thirty days preceding the holiday, I wrote to Google about 30 living nurse legends, in hopes that they would post a nursing-themed Google Doodle for our week. On another, I penned (and never sent) a scathing letter to a hospital president who had sent a kitschy card I took offense to.

[…]

2023-01-30T10:51:51-05:00May 5th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient safety|0 Comments
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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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AJN in May: Night-Shift Naps, Intrathecal Cancer Pain Relief, Teaching Nurses to Write, More

On this month’s cover is A Maid Asleep (1656–57) by the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. We chose this painting to call attention to the issue of sleepiness in nurses who work the night shift, which is explored in this month’s Original Research article.

On-the-job sleepiness among nurses can increase the risk of patient care errors, job-related injuries, and long-term health problems.

For night-shift nurses, one potential solution is being allowed to take brief naps during a shift, which the American Nurses Association recommends as an evidence-based countermeasure to fatigue. But nurses may face barriers to doing so, including a lack of formal breaks on the unit and concerns about impeding the quality of nursing care. To learn about a project that explored those barriers and attempted to implement night-shift naps, read “Napping on the Night Shift: A Two-Hospital Implementation Project.”

Some other articles of note in the May issue:

CE Feature: “Intrathecal Pumps for Managing Cancer Pain.” Among patients with cancer, moderate to severe pain is prevalent and can be refractory even with the use of systemic opioids, which may cause adverse effects that are difficult to manage at the doses required to control pain. When delivered intrathecally, however, opioids and adjuvant analgesics may provide greater pain relief at dramatically lower doses and with fewer adverse effects. This article provides an overview of intrathecal pump therapy, including its benefits and potential risks and complications; the medications that can be delivered intrathecally; and the nursing care […]

2016-11-21T13:01:16-05:00April 29th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Nurses, Exercise, Time: Hitting a Nerve

Flickr creative commons/ Richard Masoner Flickr creative commons/ Richard Masoner

Hitting a Nerve. I received several recent emails about an editorial I wrote in the April issue of AJN, in which I discussed nurses’ health practices, including exercise, in conjunction with one of our feature articles, “Original Research: An Investigation into the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Practices of RNs.”

The authors found that, for study participants,

“physical activity and stress management scores were low for the entire group of RNs.”

Drawing a connection between these findings and recent research by Letvak and colleagues suggesting an association between nurses’ health and job performance, I wrote, “If the nurse caring for you or your loved one is suffering from fatigue and stress, she or he may be more apt to make an error or to sustain a workplace injury.”

Judging from the emails I received, I hit a chord. The writers stressed the difficulty of working full time and, in many cases, caring for a family as well. Often, they said, they had little energy left over for themselves. One writer, though, did say that my editorial was the ‘kick’ she needed to get back to walking! […]

2017-06-28T14:34:26-04:00April 28th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, personal health practices|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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