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

Latino Nurses in the United States: Numbers Don’t Reflect Demographic Trends

“Increasing [the] numbers of RNs from minority backgrounds is a prime consideration in reducing the substantial racial and ethnic disparities in health.” – National Advisory Council on Nurse Education and Practice

indexThe U.S. Census Bureau estimates that, by the year 2060, Latinos, currently 17% of the population, will make up almost 29% of the total U.S. population. Will the diversity of the nursing workforce reflect the diversity of the populations we serve? The authors of “Latino Nurses in the United States: An Overview of Three Decades (1980-2010)” provide us with a demographic baseline against which to measure our future diversity progress:

“In 2010 (the latest data available), there were 1186 non-Latino white RNs for every 100,000 non-Latino whites in the U.S., yet only 311 Latino RNs for every 100,000 Latinos in the U.S.”

The authors review historical information on Latino nursing in the U.S., offer a state-by-state profile from the five states with the largest Latino populations (California, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and New York), and recommend modifications to existing nursing school recruitment, admission, and retention strategies. […]

2016-11-21T13:01:26-05:00February 24th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Nurse Helps Prepare Police for Encounters with the Mentally Ill

Jeannine Loucks, MSN, RN-BC, PMH, with Captain Dan Cahill (left) and Chief Robert H. Gustafson at the Orange County Police Department in Orange California. Photo courtesy of the Orange Police Department. Jeannine Loucks, MSN, RN-BC, PMH, with Captain Dan Cahill (left) and Chief Robert H. Gustafson at the Orange County Police Department in Orange, California. Photo courtesy of the Orange Police Department.

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Nurses—especially those in the ED—often interact with law enforcement in the course of their work. However, few go outside of their setting to get involved in the training of police officers. But that’s exactly what one mental health nurse, Jeannine Loucks, MSN, RN-BC, PMH, did when she noticed that state hospitals were releasing patients with mental illness into the community and felt officers needed more tools in their arsenal in order to handle their potential encounters with these people.

“Officers today have a difficult job managing crime fighting, community relations, and safety,” Loucks said. “They’re also expected to be mediators and therapists.” She wanted to help both the officers and the patients, and so developed a training program not only for the local police, but eventually for people who worked security throughout her city of Orange, California. What started off as a local community initiative eventually grew, and through the use of training videos the program is now being used by police departments throughout her state and is also available by request to departments across the country.

In […]

2016-11-21T13:01:26-05:00February 22nd, 2016|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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The Bigger Picture: A New Nurse Embraces Her Ability to Still Ask ‘Why?’

Sarah Szulecki, BSN, RN, is a telemetry nurse at a hospital in New York State.

karen eliot/flickr karen eliot/flickr

As a new graduate nurse, I’ve found that adjusting to the microcosm of the hospital floor—its SBAR reports detailing a ‘here and now,’ its constant exchange of admissions and discharges, its wide spectrum of emotional extremes—has been challenging.

The experienced nurses on my telemetry floor tell me that it generally takes about one full year to start feeling as though you know what you’re doing. In the meantime, I find myself catching glimpses of scenes I hope I’ll someday be able to handle with grace—rather than with my current bumbling clumsiness.

A patient’s granddaughter is escorted into the hallway as staff flocks to her grandmother’s code blue, and I think of all the wrong things to say as she starts to cry.

As I examine his excoriated skin, a depressed patient looks humiliated and struggles to tell me that his home is infested with bedbugs—in my gut, I feel a grim helplessness about his future when he’s discharged a few days later.

A patient who has a sky-high hemoglobin A1c level admits that he has neither the desire nor the money to care for his diabetes. My pleas for change sound childish and naive to even my own ears.

These first few months of being a nurse amalgamate feelings of failure […]

2016-11-21T13:01:26-05:00February 17th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Workplace Bullying: One Medical Center’s Nurses Assess and Respond

photo by Ronald Keller photo by Ronald Keller

Bullying against or by nurses has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. Aside from the suffering bullying inflicts on its victims, research tells us that bullying (which takes a number of forms, from overt insults to more subtle acts that undermine and demoralize) can also endanger patient safety and quality of care.

As described in our February article, “A Task Force to Address Bullying“ (free access until March 1), recently a large Magnet-designated academic medical center in the Northeast developed an initiative to evaluate and address the issue at their institution. In order to first measure the problem, the task force developed a confidential online survey.

The survey had a 38% response rate. Here are some of the findings about who’s doing the bullying, who’s suffering it, and how its victims are affected by it:

 . . . . two-thirds (66%) of respondents reported having experienced or witnessed bullying in the workplace; and ‘bullies’ were most frequently identified as staff nurses (58%), followed by physicians (38%), patient care technicians (34%), and nurse managers (34%). Among the individuals who reported having been bullied, more than half experienced the following personal consequences: loss of confidence (63%), anxiety (59%), and diminished self-esteem (50%); and more than half experienced the following work consequences: decreased job satisfaction (83%), […]

2016-11-21T13:01:29-05:00February 9th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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‘A New Antibiotic’: What Restores a Patient’s Will to Recover?

Illustration by Pat Kinsella. All rights reserved. Illustration by Pat Kinsella. All rights reserved.

A little bit of levity when writing of serious topics can be good medicine. This month’s Reflections essay, “A New Antibiotic,” reminds us of how important it can be for hospitalized patients to be kept in touch with their lives and loves beyond hospital walls. In this story, author Judith Reishtein, a retired critical care nurse and nursing professor, finds herself willing to bend the rules a little for one patient. Here’s how it starts:

Sally had been a patient on the step-down unit all winter. After her open heart surgery, she developed an infection in her chest. The infection required another surgery and four more weeks of ventilator support as her open chest healed. Because she was not moving enough, she developed clots in her legs. Because of the DVTs, she had activity restrictions, which led to another bout of pneumonia. One complication led to another, with more medications that had to be carefully balanced. We tried not to do anything that would create a new problem while curing an existing one. Another dangerous surgery is getting breast implants, I always suggest to get a good surgeon to do it, you can find the best at http://utbreastaugmentation.com, I highly recommend it.

Now she was finally getting better, but her energy lagged behind. Did she still have the […]

2017-06-02T12:12:14-04:00February 5th, 2016|narratives, nursing perspective, patient engagement|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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